There’s a school of thought that says the best way to get good at a language is to concentrate on the words that can’t be translated. In so doing, you really get into the mindset of the speakers of that language – and so can speak like them, too.

So when learning German, you should definitely take some time to look at the word Bildung. Don’t worry: it’s not completely and utterly untranslatable like Fahrvergnügenserfassungsbogen (lit. “driving enjoyment questionnaire form”); no, Bildung can in fact frequently be translated with one word – education. This is especially the case in politically charged slogans such as “Bildung ist der Gesellschaft höchstes Gut”, or “Society’s most important asset is education”.

Last week the University was on strike.  Not the professors or the kitchen staff or the janitors, but the students.

Let’s take a short tour of the German education system, for those of you who haven’t yet (or have just recently) up and moved here.  You can start Kindergarten when you are 3 and generally stay until around 6 years—whenever your teacher decides that you are developmentally ready to move on up to big kids school.  Grundschule (elementary school) runs from ages 6 to 9.  And then things get complicated–that is, complicated if you were born and bred on the straight-trunked American system.)

A three-tier system