Der Feuervogel aufersteht.

Since my language ability could be classified as preternatural, it may be possible that I expect too much of other people when they are faced with a foreign language.

After all, I did borrow Sylvain's French-German dictionary (since the teacher had explicitly barred me from bringing my German-English dictionary to class) to look up German legal terms regarding trials (prisoner, defendant, plaintiff, alleged, etc). The fact that a majority of English legal terms are Latinate in origin, and thus share a root with the French, no doubt helped. A lot of English words have Latinate roots (the fancy ones, mostly, since the more vulgar versions have Germanic roots: excrement vs shit), so I can sort of figure out some very basic stuff written in a Romance language.

Then there are all the cognates of German in English: bread/Brot, knight/Knecht, sun/Sonne, hell/Hölle, stool/Stühl (which actually means chair, but never mind that), board/Brett ... the list goes on.

(I'm sticking to Indo-European languages here, and not including, say, Hungarian or Japanese, because they're from different language families, and are quite different in vocabulary.)

I would expect a peer to be able to deduce that, for example, "am Montag 26. Juli um 19:00 Uhr" has something to do with Monday July 26 and 7 pm (19:00). Not so much with, I don't know, "Doch ich sage euch: Gott existiert und wenn ich euch seinen wahren Namen verrate, werdet ihr vom Unglauben abfallen und Gott preisen, denn Gottes wahrer Name ist: KEIN SCHWEIN." Except maybe it has something to do with God and pigs and names.

(That book, though? LAUGH RIOT. Until the ending, which is typisch Deutsch. Kann ich aber unbedingt empfehlen, wenn dir Terry Pratchett gefällt.)

Do I expect too much?

This ramble brought to you by procrastination.

From an article on the Secret Service (in German): Sch(m)utzengel.

Schutzengel: guardian angel
Schmutz, schmutzig: dirt, dirty

Combine them, and you get a tarnished guardian angel. Nifty, eh?

I may rant a bit here, so be forewarned.

I'm so tired of people saying German is an ugly language, a harsh language, not a poetic language. I'm tired of trying to explain how they're wrong and completely uninformed, ignorant, and clearly not remotely familiar with the actual German language.

Have they never heard of Friedrich Schiller, often referred to as the German Shakespeare? Or his friend Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who spawned an entire literary movement (introspection) and inspired the works of Mozart? Or Heinrich Heine, one of the most famous German Romantic poets and he who said "Where they burn books, they will ultimately also burn people"?

Leaving aside the copious examples of German poets, one aspect of the German language lends itself remarkably well to poetic expression: the (infamous) compound noun. There are nouns in German that require a full phrase (sometimes even a clause) to render in English. To take a well-known example, Schadenfreude: the (malicious) delight you take in someone else's misfortune.

Goethe contributed a delightful compound word to the corpus, which is a hapax legomenon (thanks joyeuse13 for the term!): Knabenmorgenblütenträume, in his poem Prometheus. (Yes, this is one of the poems I learned in college. My professor pointed out the uniqueness of the word, and it stuck in the back of my head.) A literal deconstruction of the word is boys' morning blossom dreams, which can sound a bit dirty. A better rendering is "the blossoming dreams of the morning of [my] youth."

The stanza:

Wähntest du etwa,
Ich sollte das Leben hassen,
In Wüsten fliehn,
Weil nicht alle Knabenmorgen-
Blütenträume reiften?

An approximate translation, not poetic:

Do you believe (implied: wrongly)
that I should hate life,
flee to the desert,
because not all the blossoming dreams of the
morning of my youth ripened?

The entire poem is about an angry Prometheus berating Zeus, asking why he should honor him. Interestingly, the entire compound noun only appears in the early version of the poem.

Don't disparage the language because of your ignorance. Make an effort to learn about it. You'll find you're rather wrong.