How German builds long nouns from short ones, which part decides the gender, and how to break them apart.
German has a reputation for impossibly long words. The secret is that most of them aren't new words at all: they are shorter words joined together. Where English often keeps words separate ("hospital bed", "train station"), German writes them as one, called a Kompositum, or compound.
That makes compounds less intimidating than they look. Once you know the parts, you can often work out the whole word, and every new compound you meet gives you practice with words you already know.
Many everyday German words become very literal once you split them. A few from Flashlingo's beginner deck:
Some other favourites: der Handschuh (glove) is a "hand shoe", and der Staubsauger (vacuum cleaner) is a "dust sucker". These literal meanings are memorable, which is exactly why they are useful for learning.
In a German compound, the last word is the head. It decides what the whole thing is, and it also decides the grammatical gender. Everything before it narrows the meaning down.
So das Krankenhaus takes its gender, das, from das Haus. Der Handschuh is masculine because der Schuh is masculine, even though die Hand is feminine. Once you know the gender of the last part, you know the gender of the compound. That is one of the most useful shortcuts in German vocabulary learning.
Order matters, too. The first part describes the second, so swapping them changes the meaning, just as "house boat" and "boat house" are different things in English.
Sometimes a small connecting sound appears between the parts. The most common is -s-, as in das Arbeitszimmer ("study" or "home office": die Arbeit, work, + das Zimmer, room). Others include -n- and -en-, as in das Krankenhaus.
These linking letters don't change the meaning. They mostly make the word easier to say. There are patterns, but most learners simply absorb them over time by meeting common compounds again and again.
When you meet a compound in a quiz, take a second to split it before moving on. Recognising Kühl + Schrank turns one new word into practice for two old ones, and it makes the next compound containing Schrank easier still. Always learn the article with the word, because the article of the last part gives you the gender of the whole.
Open the German quiz to practise. Every noun includes its article, and the full word list on the page is grouped by topic, so it's easy to spot compounds that share parts.