One of the joys of the awful German language is its massive portmanteau words, giant linguistic edifices made up of multiple words to form . . . well, a word like das Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, which is formed, depending on how you count, from six other words (some of them compound words as well) to mean — let’s turn it over to the Telegraph:

The word — which refers to the “law for the delegation of monitoring beef labelling”, has been repealed by a regional parliament after the EU lifted a recommendation to carry out BSE tests on healthy cattle.
German is famous for its compound nouns, which frequently become so cumbersome they have to be reduced to abbreviations. The beef labelling law, introduced in 1999 to protect consumers from BSE, was commonly transcribed as the “RkReÜAÜG”, but even everyday words are shortened to initials so Lastkraftwagen — lorry — becomes Lkw.

And now, alas, it’s no more. But worry not: Klassenzimmerverschoenerungswettbewerb – “classroom beautification contest” is still going strong, along with many, many others. And since German words can be infinitely compounded, the sky’s still the limit. If you can read German, there’s lots more here.

Or you can just take it from Mark Twain:

There are ten parts of speech, and they are all troublesome. An average sentence, in a German newspaper, is a sublime and impressive curiosity; it occupies a quarter of a column; it contains all the ten parts of speech — not in regular order, but mixed; it is built mainly of compound words constructed by the writer on the spot, and not to be found in any dictionary — six or seven words compacted into one, without joint or seam — that is, without hyphens; it treats of fourteen or fifteen different subjects, each inclosed in a parenthesis of its own, with here and there extra parentheses which reinclose three or four of the minor parentheses, making pens within pens: finally, all the parentheses and reparentheses are massed together between a couple of king-parentheses, one of which is placed in the first line of the majestic sentence and the other in the middle of the last line of it — after which comes the VERB, and you find out for the first time what the man has been talking about; and after the verb — merely by way of ornament, as far as I can make out — the writer shovels in “haben sind gewesen gehabt haben geworden sein,” or words to that effect, and the monument is finished.

By the way, one of the words for “car” is Personenkraftwagen, or PKW(pronounced “pay-kah-vay”) for short. It’s easy once you get the hang of it.