Why do Germans sometimes only understand train station?

This German Idiom is used quite commonly. If you‘re not in the loop, you might wonder why they are talking about the train station in this conversation. They don’t really.

Germans use this when they can’t make heads or tails of a situation - the English equivalent is “It’s all Greek to me.” One popular explanation: soldiers at the end of World War I were so eager to go home that the only word they wanted to hear was Bahnhof. It literally means “I only understand train station”. You can just picture a German speaker on holiday trying to communicate with the locals but only catching this one word - train station - and then turning to their fellow vacationers shrugging:

Ich verstehe nur Bahnhof.