"Du hast einen Sprung in der Schüssel": If an incensed German turns to you with those words, they are not referring to a cracked bowl in your cupboard. It is not a compliment, but means you are off your rocker, not quite right in the head, crackers.

A situation that is touch and go, which can go either way, and where things need to be carefully balanced can be described as being "auf Messers Schneide," which directly translates as "on the edge of the knife." An equivalent idiom in English rather refers to the razor's edge.

"Ans Messer liefern" means to betray someone, send them to their doom. "Die Messer wetzen" (sharpen the knives) can describe a person preparing for an argument, and "Messer an die Kehle setzen" (putting a knife to someone's throat) is to force that person to make a decision. Recklessness can lead a person to colloquially run straight into the open knife, "ins offene Messer laufen."

The German idiom "Vorsicht ist die Mutter der Porzellankiste" translates as, "caution is the mother of the china box." The imagery is clear: You want to handle anything as fragile as china with utmost care and caution — just like any potentially dicey or uncertain situation. In other words, better safe than sorry!

Porcelain and glass can easily break, but this German idiom warns that happiness or luck (which both translate as "Glück") is just as fragile: "Glück und Glas, wie leicht bricht das" is a warning to not take anything that can easily crack or fade for granted.

In German, "in die Pfanne hauen" literally means to throw something into a frying pan. However, depending on context, it's not about frying eggs or steak, but about telling on someone, giving them away, ratting them out or playing a dirty trick on them. Being hurled into the idiomatic frying pan would give someone a raw deal.

The German idiom "über den Tellerrand gucken" literally means to peer over the rim of your plate. If you always peer into or at the plate set before you, you will never experience anything else — in other words, you should raise your eyes to see beyond your own nose and take in the bigger picture, think outside the box.

The imagery in this German idiom involves spoons. "Die Weisheit nicht mit Löffeln gefressen haben" literally translates as someone "not having eaten wisdom with a spoon": The person described in this way is regarded as simple, foolish or slow — not the brightest bulb in the box.

Bite the dust, kick the bucket, go toes up — a German slang term for dying also involves spoons: "den Löffel abgeben," to hand over the spoon. The idiom likely goes back to the Middle Ages, when people would always carry with them their own personal spoon made of wood or bone. When they died, this spoon would pass to someone else.