Scooter scourge

After all these years I'm still trying to learn "die schreckliche deutsche Sprache".

In amongst my futile efforts to absorb the Nominativ, the Akkusativ, the Dativ, the Fartiv, the Genitiv, along with the mire of Artikels and Prepositons I often regress to daydreaming. Most dreams explore the possible recreational drug or Humoral therapies that may help with linguistic assimilation.

In amongst the main daydreams are sub-plots. One of these sub-plots presented the stumper "how many words are there in the German language?" which lead to a sibling head-scratcher "shall i compare thee to … the number of words in the English language?"

So without further ado … DYSWIDT

English word count - 470 000 words
German word count - over 300 000 (or 17.4 million base forms)

and as a "wasteful-expense-of-your time" bonus, the Italian word count at approximately 260 000 words. This number obviously excludes the 337 634 hand gestures employed in everyday Italian interactions.

As with most of my entries the image has BATDWTT and more links than chainmail underpants.