W.A.G. #2

Guten Tag, Damen und Herren! Welcome to W.A.G. #2, your second Installment of the funniest German Words I can think of. This Week's Word is: Psychologie. Now you may be thinking, "That word looks totally normal and boring. Miss Hattie, why have you been taking crazy pills with your daily Getreideflockengericht?" That means Cereal, Boys and Girls, or literally: cereal-flake-dish.

The answer is this: pronunciation! While any old monkey can find some long crazy word that Germans have made to save paper (think of all the blank spaces they eliminate! They could make space bars a complete thing of the past! No more spaces or bars!), it takes a true connoisseuse (yes, I like to practice noun-adjective gender agreement when at all possible in our shockingly gender neutral language - are my hands male or female? HOW WILL I LIVE WITHOUT KNOWING????) to find words that look innocuous but are in fact as nutso as they come (20 points if you can tell me whence that picture hails).

OK, enough buildup. Here's the explanation. Psychologie is pronounced: p'SOO-kho-low-ghee. As a disclaimer, I don't know how to actually phonetically demonstrate/write out pronunciation. Here are the lights, both high and low, of this fantabulous word.

1) Both p and s sounds are pronounced, clearly and distinctly, leaving the oft-confused listener-of-German no doubt about how this word (or at least its beginning) is spelled.

2) The "y" is pronounced as if it were u/oo.

3) The "ch" has the requisite throat gargle popular in German and French (the only languages I can speak without much accent since my tongue refuses to roll r's).

4) And keep that g hard as the Iron Curtain, people! Soft g's are for those sissy Swiss.

It's all so weird, I can't believe it's not Dutch! Am I right or am I super right? I know that in English we have stupid pronunciation for a lot of things (which can for the most part be blamed on the Brits - Worcerstershire, guys? Really?) but this takes things to a whole new level. Leave it to the inventors of Gummibärchen to come up with a whimsical, and let's not forget delicious, way to dress up such a seemingly boring and uninteresting word.

In summary, you better prepare before ze German gets you. It's not only surface-crazy, it's got that innocent-looking-little-girl-who's-actually-an-ax-murderer horror movie type of crazy. You're thinking, "Aww, look how cute and sweet it is with its weird long words and funny verb conjugation! It's really adorable how hard it tries; what a well-meaning if oft-misguided language!" Meanwhile, German is thinking "Just you wait, foolish Amerikaner. My evil plot to explode your brains with unpredictable Kokolores (translation: nonsense! How delightful!) has only just begun!" ACHTUNG! Not so innocent this language is.

(Sidenote: Yoda-phrasing is very similar to German sentence construction - VERB AT THE END MUST GO!!!!)