German Language Trivia
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100 free German Language trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
German is the language that gave English kindergarten, wanderlust and poltergeist, builds words the length of a train, capitalises every noun and once had its own keyboard argument about where Z belongs. It is also a language full of traps for English speakers, from words that look like presents but mean something far less welcome to a 'Handy' nobody in Britain or America would recognise. These 100 questions are about the language, not a test in it, covering the false friends and loanwords, the three genders and the case everyone says is dying, the dialects of the Alps and the northern lowlands, the 1996 spelling reform and the letter ß, the compound words that made Guinness, everyday idioms and greetings, and the far-flung corners of the world where German is still spoken. Every answer comes with a one-line explanation that adds something you did not know. Play it yourself, set it for a German class, or print it for a quiz night.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What does German Gift mean, a false friend whose old 'present' sense survives only in Mitgift, meaning dowry?
Poison
Poison is what Gift means in modern German, a euphemism that grew out of the sense 'dose' of medicine in Old High German. Dutch keeps both: gift for a present, gif for poison.
Q 02Which everyday object do Germans call a Handy, a pseudo-anglicism that no native English speaker would recognise?
A mobile phone
A mobile phone is a Handy in Germany, a word no native English speaker would use for it. Germans likewise call a projector a Beamer and a classic car an Oldtimer.
Q 03Which educator coined the word Kindergarten in 1840, a 'children's garden' that English adopted without translating it?
Friedrich Fröbel
Friedrich Fröbel coined Kindergarten in 1840 for his play institute at Bad Blankenburg, and English simply borrowed the word. Prussia banned kindergartens in 1851 as a socialist threat, and the ban outlasted him.
Q 04Which two keys trade places on a German keyboard, one of them a letter German uses only in loanwords and names?
Y and Z
Y and Z swap places on German keyboards, which gives the layout its name, QWERTZ. Z is far more common in German, while Y turns up only in loanwords and names such as Meyer.
Q 05Every word of which class is capitalised in written German, a habit that Danish abolished in 1948?
Nouns
Nouns are all capitalised in German, a habit now almost unique to it and its close relative Luxembourgish. English did the same for a while, into the 1700s, as the original United States Constitution shows.
Q 06Which 1963 Kennedy line in West Berlin spawned a false legend that he had called himself a jelly doughnut?
Ich bin ein Berliner
Ich bin ein Berliner was perfectly good German: Berliners call that doughnut a Pfannkuchen, and the 'jelly doughnut' story is an urban legend that only emerged two decades after the speech.
Q 07Which German act's anti-war song about balloons hit number two on the Billboard Hot 100 sung in German?
Nena
Nena's '99 Luftballons' reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100 in its original German, stuck behind Van Halen's 'Jump'. The English '99 Red Balloons' did not chart in the US at all.
Q 08The breed name Dachshund is German for a hound bred to flush out which burrowing animal?
Badger
Badger dog is what Dachshund means, from Dachs and Hund, though Germans themselves mostly call the breed a Dackel.
Q 09Which American author's 1880 essay 'The Awful German Language' appeared as Appendix D of A Tramp Abroad?
Mark Twain
Mark Twain mocked German's separable verbs and endless compounds, and concluded that a gifted person could learn English in thirty hours, French in thirty days and German in thirty years.
Q 10German leads the EU in native speakers; across Europe as a whole, only which language has more?
Russian
Russian is the only language with more native speakers than German in Europe. Inside the EU more adults understand English, yet German is the most common mother tongue.
Q 11German is one of three official languages in which kingdom?
Belgium
Belgium's other two are Dutch and French. Its German speakers live in the east around Eupen, on land the Treaty of Versailles took from Germany and gave to Belgium after the First World War.
Q 12South Tyrol, where German is co-official and most residents speak it, is an autonomous province of which country?
Italy
Italy annexed South Tyrol after the First World War, and when Mussolini's government banned teaching in German, locals ran secret 'catacomb schools'. Today German is co-official there again.
Q 13Which African country made German official in 1984, then chose English alone at independence in 1990?
Namibia
Q 21Bavarian dialects are spoken not only in Bavaria and South Tyrol but across most of which neighbouring country?
Austria
Austria is mostly Bavarian-speaking, from Vienna to Salzburg and Carinthia, which is why the group is also called Austro-Bavarian and counts some 14.5 million speakers.
Q 22Which country's Standard German replaced ß with ss during the 20th century, so that Straße is printed Strasse?
Switzerland
Switzerland dropped ß gradually, not by a single decree: Zürich's schools stopped teaching it in the 1930s, other cantons followed, and the newspapers gave it up one by one.
Q 23Mädchen, the German word for girl, takes which grammatical gender because of its diminutive -chen suffix?
Neuter
Namibia still recognises German as a national language, even though its government saw German and Afrikaans as symbols of apartheid and colonialism and picked 'neutral' English at independence.
Q 14Pennsylvania Dutch, spoken by the Amish, is not Dutch at all but a variety of which regional dialect from the Rhineland?
Palatine
Palatine German is the root of Pennsylvania Dutch, and the Old Order Amish and Old Order Mennonites now make up the vast majority of its speakers, passing it on to their children.
Q 15Yiddish, the Ashkenazi language that grew out of medieval High German, is traditionally written in which alphabet?
Hebrew
Hebrew letters are used to write Yiddish even though its grammar and core vocabulary are Germanic; the language arose in the Holy Roman Empire and absorbed Mishnaic Hebrew and some Aramaic.
Q 16In which castle did Martin Luther, sequestered for ten months from 1521, translate the New Testament in eleven weeks?
Wartburg
Wartburg Castle hid Luther after the Diet of Worms: Frederick the Wise had him taken there for his safety, and he lived under the name Junker Jörg, 'Knight George', while he translated.
Q 17Luther's Bible appeared during which stage of the language, conventionally dated 1350 to 1650 following Wilhelm Scherer?
Early New High German
Early New High German is the stage Luther wrote in. He based his Bible on the chancery language of the Saxon court, already used well beyond Saxony, which helped his wording travel across the dialects.
Q 18Which northern variety, protected in Germany since 1999, kept 'maken' where the south shifted to machen?
Low German
Low German, or Plattdeutsch, never underwent the High German consonant shift, so like English and Dutch it keeps the old p, t and k sounds. Germany protects it under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.
Q 19The Benrath line, the maken–machen isogloss of German dialects, is named after a district of which Rhine city?
Düsseldorf
Düsseldorf's southern district of Benrath is where the line crosses the Rhine, which gave it its name; from there it runs east to Frankfurt an der Oder.
Q 20The 'hoch' in Hochdeutsch, the everyday German name for the standard language, was originally a reference to what?
The southern uplands
The southern uplands and the Alps gave Hochdeutsch its name, because the standard's sounds are largely those of the High German spoken there; 'high' was a geographic label, not a social one.
Neuter is the gender of Mädchen, so 'a little girl' is ein kleines Mädchen, and a relative pronoun in the same sentence is das rather than die.
Q 24The loanword poltergeist pairs Geist, meaning ghost, with the German verb poltern, which means what?
To rumble
To rumble or make a racket is what poltern means, so a poltergeist is a 'noisy ghost' blamed for loud bangs and objects moving by themselves.
Q 25A German who claims to 'have a pig' (Schwein haben) means what, an idiom Hungarian echoes with 'has a piglet'?
Being lucky
Being lucky is all Schwein haben means. The origin is uncertain, but it probably goes back to medieval contests in which the worst competitor was given a pig as a consolation prize.
Q 26A German who 'only understands train station' (nur Bahnhof verstehen) is admitting to understanding how much?
Nothing
Nothing is what nur Bahnhof verstehen admits to understanding; one theory traces it to front-line soldiers for whom 'train station' meant only furlough and the trip home.
Q 27Germans 'press their thumbs' (Daumen drücken) to wish someone luck; which English-speaking gesture is the equivalent?
Crossing one's fingers
Crossing one's fingers is the English match for Daumen drücken, which tucks the thumb inside the other four fingers; 'Ich drücke die Daumen' is said before a friend's exam.
Q 28Kummerspeck, the German word for weight put on by emotional overeating, translates literally as what?
Grief bacon
Grief bacon is Kummerspeck word for word, but it sounds less odd in German, where Speck is also the everyday joking word for a person's own padding of fat.
Q 29Which carmaker's 1990 US advertising campaign taught Americans the word Fahrvergnügen, meaning 'driving pleasure'?
Volkswagen
Volkswagen's ads popularised the German word in the US with a stick figure seated as if at the wheel, yet its American sales still slid in the years that followed.
Q 30German's polite 'you', Sie, historically derives from which other pronoun, whose verb forms it still shares?
They
They is the pronoun behind Sie: German's formal address grew out of the third-person plural, so 'Sie kommen' can mean both 'you are coming' and 'they are coming'.