Mattlocked wrote:

"avsnitt" = paragraph seems to be the German "Abschnitt"

And there you go. Got a lot for free when learning German. ;)

Would love to use "my" Swedish more often, but then it was - as you say - only the basic stuff all the time. Hi, thanks, coffee please.... But it was never enough for business talk, so I have to switch to English then. 

Haha, it would probably not even be enough for a pm atm. 
No, I mean by phone, like listen to and answer... For writing I don't have enough grammar knowledge.

I know enough German to politely say that I don't know German. ;)

Anyway, this thread is probably becoming a bit too... (and there I don't know a good English word for what I mean. I would use the word "intern" - meaning "internal" - but I don't think that's a good way to use that word in English).

Schmiezi wrote:

@Russel:I didn't read properly the first time and thought it meant "the necessity to eat a banana". That, he doesindeed have several times a day (though he is only allowed one per day).
Iam used to our way of glueing words together, so I was very surprised when I understood at school the in English, you need severalwords to translate one long German word. Like the famous "Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän"which means "the captain of the company that owns steamboats that drive on the Danube".

 
Neat.  I often found that tendency strangely interesting (as well as the different marks over letters and how guttural some of the languages in that 'family' sound).  But yeah, like mentioned, other languages have the ability to describe a lot of things you can't briefly in English!  (although we do have plenty of our own confusing word quirks and idioms )  I only ever took a few years of Spanish in high school, so more familiar with Romance language structure.  Unfortunately not great at languages to have tried out any German, though, considering that's the nation of origin of some of my mom's side (her dad even proudly recalled "coming over on the boat" when very young)… never really brought up his language much!
But good grief, some of the elaborate compounds they have!  When googling for some of my favorite more poetic words I remembered hearing about, came across various phrases such as Backpfeifengesicht (lol that they have word for a face that needs slapped), but… Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz??   

But found some of favorites and more awesome ones here:  http://mentalfloss.com/article/50698/38-wonderful-foreign-words-we-could-use-english  Love how poetic some of these are…