Hi. I’m an absolute beginner in German, just having started to learn from scratch a few days ago. I just came across the word “Beobachtungsgabe (observation skills)” and was surprised to see that it’s actually one word instead of being separated into a few words. This is a silly question, but I wonder if even native German speakers have a hard time memorising these relatively long words? :)

And one more thing: Does the German language have just as many idiomatic expressions as French does? That is, those expressions that you are not supposed to interpret literally, such as « être à deux doigts de » and « avoir le bras long » in French. I wonder if there is a website dedicated to showing these kinds of idiomatic German expressions such as “kurzen Prozess machen”?

@Alone-zee Don’t let the lack of a space confuse you. Fusing words together is just how German grammar (and orthography) does these things. In English, you have the same grammatical feature just with spaces (e.g., observation capability – not a good translation, just illustrating the mechanism); in French, you would use some construct involving prepositions (esprit d'observation).

@Alone-zee I haven’t counted, but I would guess that both are in the same order of magnitude. Such expressions should be contained in dictionaries.