Schinken and Hähnken

Okay, I might not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but I found this a little confusing. Schinken is ham and Hähnken is chicken. Completly the opposite of what I expected. I am currently living on Schnellstraße in Altona, Hamburg. I found out last week that Schnell means fast, so I am living on Fast Street. Sehr Super, I know. It's strange though because in Deutschland 'fast' means 'almost'. So if you translate my street name into English twice, I'm living on 'Almost Street', it doesn't quite have the same ring to it. I live on Almost Street, well it's almost a street ,it's more of an alley way, well almost.

I have been learning German now for three weeks and it remains a challenge. There are three genders to choose from and God knows how many verb tenses to choose from. We learnt about the Akkusativ last week. 'Der' is the masculine definite article, so 'The coffee is good' would be 'der Kaffee ist gut'. However, when the coffee becomes the object in the sentence 'I drink the coffee', it becomes 'Ich trinke den Kaffee'. I am still getting my head around this one.

But seriously, I am really enjoying learning German, and I now realise why sie Germans are so good at engineering. The German language is like a science, very precise. English on the other hand is an art, many ways of conveying the same idea and multiple methods of getting across an identical concept . Crazy.