The German language has a reputation for being, well, crazy. To the Anglophone ear, comically staccato, unwieldy phrases are pieced together, words tacked onto other words to express sentiments and concepts wholly untranslatable. Case in point: rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, or “the law for the delegation of monitoring beef labeling.”
The German language has a reputation for being, well, crazy. To the Anglophone ear, comically staccato, unwieldy phrases are pieced together, words tacked onto other words to express sentiments and concepts wholly untranslatable. Case in point: rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, or “the law for the delegation of monitoring beef labeling.”
Flula Borg is a German techno DJ, actor, and YouTube personality, who thinks English can be just as ridiculous.
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Born in Erlangen, he now lives in Los Angeles. You might recognize him from the 2015 comedy Pitch Perfect 2, in which he played the leader of a German a cappella group—but he is also known for a series of YouTube videos in which he feigns misunderstanding of common American-English phrases, to hilarious results.
“Please do not tickle my fancy,” he warns in one video. He doesn’t know where it is, but he doesn’t want you tickling it.
