I think Steve Martin was channeling my language teacher

Back when he was doing stand-up comedy shows, Steve Martin had this wonderful bit about his frustration over the obtuseness of the French language:

It's like this, let me give you an example: Chapeau means "hat." Oeuf means "egg." It's like those French have a different word for everything!

This quip springs to mind whenever I learn more German vocabulary. I joke that it's an economical language except when it isn't-- the same word (with the same spelling) can mean different things. You are supposed to figure it out through context, but sometimes that can be quite tricky. For example, "Paar" can mean either a few or a pair. "Da" can mean either "here" or "there," which makes it truly one of the great weasel words of any language-- you know, like "where is my present?" "Oh, ist da" (and run out of the room). "Eis" can either mean ice cream or ice cubes. "Bitte" (an everyday word) can mean either please or you're welcome/my pleasure. And so forth-- there are A LOT of examples. This economy of words doesn't exactly make up for the overuse of words in other realms though. The word "The" in German is one of the knottier problems new students have to learn. It could be one of (technically) 16 different words, (but thankfully only 5 different spellings)-- it all depends on the noun and the verb it's used with. You figure out the noun from its article, or more bluntly, ahem, its sex: All nouns are masculine, feminine or neutral, so when you learn a new word, you have to also learn its article-- so the word for car is never just "Auto," it's "das Auto" (neutral). There are no hard and fast rules for masculine or feminine nouns though, and even sexism can't point you in the right direction. Sure, flowers are feminine (die Blumen), but then again so are little boy stalwarts like spiders and snakes (die Spinnen, die Schlangen). Verbs can switch stuff around in a hurry though, but I'd just as soon not go into that right now-- my head hurts. This isn't an easy language to learn, but I'm swinging away.