Hello everyone,
And welcome back to Summer Camp 24.
Yes, that’s the name I have settled on now :).
Last week, we had a quiz about cases, and there’s a second part still to come, but I kind of wanted to mix it up a bit and that’s why today, we’ll do something more fun and explore some more German expressions.
And this time, we’ll focus on
German Expressions with Food
We already had “seinen Senf dazugeben” in a previous episode, but there are way more food idioms to be found.
And speaking of “previous episode” and “to be found”.
I’m currently reworking the course archive and course navigation (part of it is already done).
And I think I’ll also open a quiz archive, so you can finally find ALL these quiz episodes in one place.
So that’ll come soon.
But now, let’s jump in and learn some idioms to impress your German speaking friends with.
Or just your German speaking best friend. Which is you yourself ;)
Here’s what we’ll do:
I’ve picked 7 German idioms that involve some food stuff.
I’ll give you the “raw” idiom along with a generic example and then some options for what it could express and you need to pick the correct one.
I have tried my best to make most options make sense, and the generic example I give is stripped of context, so it could go either way.
But if you’re now like “Hmm, isn’t that just guessing then?” don’t worry… that’s what the hint is for :).
In the hint, I’ll give you a nudge in the right direction. I tried to make it not too clear though. So if you get one wrong… don’t beat yourself up over it.
And then, along with the correct answer, I’ll give you some background where the expression has its origins and I’ll also give you an example WITH context.
So, are you ready?
Dann viel Erfolg and viel Spaß!!
And? How did you you?
Let me know if you’ve already heard any of these and also if they possibly also exist in your mother tongue.
If you have a nice common expression with food in your language that you like, please share that as well :).
And of course, if you have any questions, I’m right there in the comments to clear it up.
I really hope you enjoyed this episode, have a great week and bis zum nächsten Mal.
Audio Speed
Dark Mode
Wouldn’t it make more sense if the ‘Um’ in ‘Um die Wurst gehen’ was refering to what it is about?.. Like
‘Worum geht’s hier? – Um die Wurst’
Not sure what you’re asking me here to be honest. Please clarify
In question 4 you say that the ‘Um’ in ‘Um die Wurst gehen’ is used as to go around the ‘Wurst’. But couldn’t it possibly be refering to what the thing is about?
‘Es geht um etwas’
It makes sense to me i think
That’s only the literal translation though, the “around”. The actual meaning does come from “um” in a sense of “for”. “kämpfen um”, “werben um”, “gehen um”,…
Also Leute, mal ‘ran an den Speck, das alles da ist nur Kaese, bloss um total ehrlich zu sagen, ist aber sowas wirklich nicht mein Bier! Oh, jetzt geht’s um die Wurst….Ujj, verdammt u. zugenaeht!!,’Bin doch echt schon wieder ins Fettnaepfchen getreten. Danke, Ihr treulose Tomaten!
Freely translated: Ok people. now let’s get down to cases, the rest here is all nonsense, to be perfectly frank, this stuff really isn’t my concern. Aha, but the plot thickens…Ohh, geezlouise, I really stepped in it this time. Thanks a lot you ungrateful bunch!
“Nicht mein Bier” was on my shortlist, but I found it too obvious. “ran an den Speck” is great!! Thanks for mentioning both!! “treulose Tomaten” … I didn’t know that one :)
When I visited that Austrian friend of mine, I happened to overhear him refer to another friend of his who apparently rather irked him because of some disloyalty, “Du treulose Tomate!”
Glad you enjoyed them:-)
Halle alle zusammen. Ich freue mich herzlich, hier zu sein. Und vielen Dank Herr Emanuel für Ihre Hilfe. Dank Ihnen kann ich fantastische Artikel über die deutsche Sprache, die Sie erzeugt hat, und mein Deutsch verbessern. Vielen Dank nochmals!
Auf Rumaenisch sagen wir ”Alles ist Kraut” mit Meinung ”all is upside down, scattered, bad, defective”.
We have something similar “wie Kraut und Rüben”… it means that something is really messy, in disarray.
Hi,
I am someone who recently started my german learning journey, i found this place when i was kinda low on morale and it helped me recharge it, the way the author conveys their msg and how to view certain things is really helpful. Just now i have received a sponser-ship to be able to invest more time here, learning about more stuff and how to put them in practice. I would like to pay big thanks to those who made this opportunity and hopefully show them some progress soon.
Thank you Team Spirit.
Ich kann es mir vorstellen dass Leute im allgemeinen Praxis „was ist das für ein Käse.“ Wäre es aber nicht grammatikalisch korrekt „einen Wurst“ zu sagen? Akk nach für?
“für ein” is a single block here (meaning “what sort of”, it’s a fixed expression), so “für” isn’t being used as a preposition. The correct case for the cheese is nominative, as determined by the “ist”. You can think about what the answer to the question would look like: “Der Käse ist ein Blauschimmelkäse”.
Danke, ich hatte die gleiche frage.
Check auch meine Antwort auf pmccann für ein paar mehr Details :)
Pretty nicely put.
However, I’d say it a bit differently.
“was für” is a fixed phrase that has no case. Like a question word, but it can be split.
– Was für ein Käse ist das?
– Was ist das für ein Käse?
The element after it gets the case according to the sentence.
– Mit was für einem Auto bist du gefahren. (Cases comes from mit)
– Was für einem Tier hast du Essen gegeben? (Case comes from the verb “geben”)
In the original, we have the verb “ist” which has Nominative on both sides.
Oh God, I just realised I typed “für ein” instead of the intended “was für”. (Some days, some days… Sigh/FFS…) Thanks for being polite about my bone-headedness, and for giving a richer perspective on the case issue.
Auf Russisch sagt man „alles in Schokolade“. Meine Meinung nach ist dass Schokolade besser als Butter.
OH, dem stimme ich nicht zu :).
Ich mag lieber Butter, aber ich bin generell kein Fan von Schokolade.
6 correct! They all seemed pretty logical to me.
Even without the hints?
Meine (Deutsche) Frau war zu lernen die Ürsprung diese Idiome begeistert !!
Super :)
– Meine Frau war davon begeistert, die Ursprünge…. zu lernen.
Nicht gut. Ich have die Hints “misleading” gefunden.
Oh echt? Welche denn zum Beispiel?
Du hättest einen Artikel schreiben können, in dem es nur um die Wurst geht
Hmmm, vielleicht im Adventskalender.
The only one i knew is “das ist mir Wurst”
Wow, that’s a real surprise to me.
That was great. I missed a lot, but I hadn’t seen these expressions before.
I have a feeling you’ll see one sooner or later, now that they’re somewhat familiar :).
Hallo,
Some typos first:
“some options what it could express” (some options for what it could express)
“I have tried my to make most options make sense” (I have tried my best to make most options make sense)
In the “Wurst” question itself (the actual box), you wrote crunsh instead of crunch (it’s correct in the description)
I got all but one right (the butter one I got wrong), am very familiar with the Wurst one, the others I guessed from the expression itself or the hint.
Great quiz and bis bald!
In hungarian there is a similar idiom to “alles in Butter”: “Tejben-vajban fürdik.”. The literal translation is “He/she is bathing in milk and butter.”. It means that he/she lives in great prosperity, well-being; he/she is well provided for, is provided with all good things.
It means that it’s crush time. Now, it really matters. (Sausage was a price in village customs)
Your answer made sense of this! Crunch time, and prize, not price.
Hi. Not to be picky but to “bite the bullet” is not the appropriate phrase for the dog-sitting example (sorry!). To bite the bullet means to take a big risk, like to accept a task that may fail, taking that job offer when you don’t know if you will
succeed at it, or jump off a cliff with a bungey chord tied round your ankles! A better phrase would have been “to draw the short straw”
Good to know, thanks.
Is there something other than drawing the short straw?
I don’t agree with Jinksy on this one at all – “bite the bullet” comes from the (alleged?) practice of giving someone a bullet or something else hard to bite down on while something intensely painful is happening to them and there’s no anesthetic available (or if you don’t have anything stronger than alcohol). So it’s all about facing/enduring something unpleasant or painful.
“Draw the short straw” could work if it’s bad luck that you’re stuck with the unpleasant task instead of somebody else having to do it.
That’s what I thought it was. Maybe it’s a AE vs BE thing?
As for last straw… I realized that I don’t like it as a translation for “in den sauren Apfel beißen” because that one can be by choice. Like… you volunteer to bite the apple.
Note that the “short straw” and the “last straw” are two different straws XD
The “last” is the one that broke the camel’s back.
Oh ups, that was an automatic mistake. I was thinking of the right one, but the wrong one came out :)
Drawing the short straw… das kürzere Streichholz ziehen (vielleicht? Seems a good fit, if the rather meagre online game with a similar name is any guide)
And the final straw (the one breaks the poor camel’s back) is not going to be much of a revelation to anyone: just the old workhorse: Der Tropfen, der das Fass zum überlaufen bringt. I remember tripping over this one as a rank beginner and finding it (grammatically) opaque, but exactly *why* is pretty much impossible to pinpoint now: I guess the “der das” just looks like overkill if you don’t know what a relative clause is.
(Sorry, dies ist ein rein reflexives Beitrag, sogar wenn es nichts Reflexives enthält.)
The equivalent I’ve seen for “draw the short straw” is die Arschkarte ziehen ;D (although at least dict.cc gives a couple of alternatives – den Schwarzen Peter or den Kürzeren ziehen). But die Arschkarte will always have my heart
Arschkarte is the best match, I think.
“kürzeren ziehen” is used more in contexts of losing in a competition or fight.
Aah, nice: thanks for that. I’m gently ushering die Arschkarte ziehen into my long-term memory as I type. (I guess I should have twigged that there’s a pretty good chance of a Schwein/Sau or an Arsch being involved somewhere along the line!)
“Das schlaegt vom Fass den Boden aus!” is what I remember for that particular idiom. Of course,NO idiom in any language ever, at least only rarely, has an exact translation.
I recently edited an article for a translation journal and I noticed, “Die Flinte ins Korn werfen” and right alongside “to throw in the towel” aka “to give up”.
While I didn’t agree a hundred percent with this translation, I didn’t wish to nit pick as it made as much sense as any I’d seen.
You mean for “that’s the last straw,” right?
Yeah, it’s pretty futile to look for exact correspondence – but I think it’s helpful to ask the question, “What would a German speaker say if xyz happened?” It can be pretty interesting to reflect on comparative mentalities based on languages’ available idioms.
Exactly. Although I’m also a native German speaker, I also heard English at home from my American father and German from my German mother growing up in Berlin.
Thomas “lucked out”.
Thomas “got the short end of the stick”.
Wait, “lucked out”?? I thought that was positive :)
Yeah, “luck out” is a good thing – Glück or Schwein haben. (Quite often in an unexpected, bacon-saving or envy-inducing way.)
“Es hat (mich) geglueckt!” is more formal, but also possible.
What? I don’t think I have ever heard it with Accusative. Is that a regional thing maybe?
A child of the Spree as well as the Havel, I will occasionally when under pressure or rushing revert to certain “non-standard” turns of phrase:-) Of course, it should be simply
“Es hat geglueckt” LOL
Yes please a quiz archive would be wunderbar!
I knew a few and learned a few. Love it, and the ‘real’ origins are different than I would have thought. I still see people jumping up to bite a dangling sausage in my mind (cannot be UNSEEN!). Das ist mir wurst will be easy to put in to my lexicon since as you mentioned, it is just replacing egal. (ps – do check out the typos below. A few of them almost give alternative meanings on first reading). Thanks again!
Fun, fun, fun: I knew a few of them (in den sauren Apfel beißen, alles in Butter, …ist mir Wurst), and the others were pretty easy to guess without hints ;-) Very happy to add “durch den Kakao ziehen” to my arsenal for that rare occasion where it’ll be fitting: it draws a nice vivid picture, no matter whether you think in terms of Kakao or the original substance!
A bunch of little corrections…
som eoptions => some options
((The rest are from the Quiz questions))
Q1: to something is very => to something *that* is very
Q2: nutriant rich => nutri*e*nt rich
Q3: and dogsitted => and dog*sat* (Others might disagree(?), but dogsitted/babysitted just sound off to me)
seemlessly integrate => se*a*mlessly integrate
Q4: (Sausage was a price) => (Sausage was a *prize*) (I guess that’s what you meant here: native German speaker detection activated!)
leftfovers => leftovers
The origin are old folk festival => The origin*s* are old folk festival*s*
compete who’s the first… => *try to be* the first… (or “compete to be the first…”)
a dangled up sausage => a dangling sausage
Q5: circumstance => circumstances
Q6: like glas or porcelaine => like glas*s* or porcelain**
Q7: parodizing something. => parodying something. (While I can find “parodize” being used it’s extremely rare: “parody/parodying/parodies” seem to be hundreds or thousands of times more frequent)
“The Death of Stalin” parodizes => “The Death of Stalin” parodies (ditto…)
Thanks so much for these fixes!!
Honestly embarrassing for me, but the backend for entering the quizzes is awful. It’s just so fragmented and cluttered that my eyes constantly lose track of where I am.
Haha… shouldn’t/needn’t be embarrassing in the slightest: everyone is acutely aware of the sensation of reading *what you think is there* in your own writing rather than what’s actually staring at you on the page, or in those multifarious, ugly text fields. It’s much more efficient for a second or third pair of eyes to “groom”(#) the text at that stage :-)
(#) I dread that this may soon be (or already be!) an unusable word in such contexts. Won’t somebody *please* think of the baboons?
“or in those multifarious, ugly text fields.”
This is exactly it. One million buttons and labels on screen and some tiny unexpanded text fields in between.
“groom”… yeah, I did think the Hollywood type first.
Ugh… something weird happened with login: I guess I’d been logged out “hinter den Kulissen” but the UI hadn’t updated to reflect that fact. In any case, ’tis me (pmccann) in the other comment at this level, as was undoubtedly obvious. Alles in Schmalz!
Id go for dog sat too.