AboutCornelia Neumann Expertise I can answer questions regarding grammar and style, as well as many questions about German culture, history, and literature.
Experience I am native speaker with a German degree in Teaching English as a Foreign Language and German. I lived and worked in the USA for seven years (taught high school and all college levels) and spent three years as a high school teacher of German and EFL at an international school in Mexico. In 2006 I returned to Germany, where I am currently working as a teacher in Hamburg.
Please could you refresh my memory? I'm pretty certain there's a suffix you can stick on the end of words to give the meaning of "hopeless with/at", e.g. Computer..., Sprachen..., etc.
It may well be wrong, but somehow Müffel comes to mind, so Computermüffel, Sprachenmüffel etc.?
Much obliged,
Simon
Answer Hello Simon,
if it's someone really hopeless I'd actually go with -idiot, if the situation allows for this kind of language. :-)
The word you're remembering is -muffel, which is not so much a person who simply can't do this or that but more one who is neither all that interested (90%) nor all that talented (10%).
A Computermuffel would not understand much about computers but would also not be bothered enough by this to try and find out how they work.
