It's also one of the most difficult parts of learning German as an adult, despite being a relatively simple syntactic rule and something we kinda-sorta emulate in English. The other part, at least for me, were false friends. Also sorry to all the lurking Germans waiting to comment, I forgot all of my German the moment I graduated college.

It makes more context to translate "Zeug" as "tool" in most compound words, it is its original meaning like in Feuerzeug, Flugzeug, Fahrzeug, Rüstzeug.

As someone who speaks German alright (lived there awhile and studied a few years in school) gendered nouns and all of the versions of "the" are just stupidly laborious and I never cared if I got it wrong. Even if my accent was okay (it wasn't okay, my US German teacher was Danish and I was sometimes told I sounded Danish) my lack of fucks about der, die, das, dem etc made it very obvious I wasn't a native speaker.

All of that said, I found that popup kids book pretty easy to read.

Very useful for when he's done getting the Flammenwerfer

We make these huge, clunky compound words so that we can introduce new abbreviations. That's a HLF.

Danke

Peter was the guy with the nasty hair and nails. The kid in orange is Konrad or little suck-a-thumb. His thumbs are cut of by the a random man with big sharp scissors because he wouldn't stop sucking his thumbs. So he kind of had it coming. He was even warned by his mother.

But seriously the girl on the bottom is maybe the only good story I would actually tell my children. It's about a girl who kept playing with fire even tho she was repeatedly told how dangerous it was.

There is also one story about a black kid that is being bullied for the colour his skin. A bystander doesn't like that and dips the dipshits in ink so their skin is even darker than that of the black child. Wich is kind of slay but still portrays dark skin as worse than lighter skin soo :(

This, but seriously. If you know the words it's trivial, and when you know a little German it's much less confusing than it seems.

Say you got a pen ... Now add apple, it's a applepen. Say you got a pen ... Now add pineapple, you got pineapplepen.

American here who studied German for eight years, graduated with a minor in German, and lived there for one year:

I’m not sure how to properly translate this children’s book.

The long word breaks into easily-understood pieces:

“help-ability-extinguish-group-travel-thing”

But in order to get a proper concept back out of it you need to know what order the pieces go together in and I don’t know that.

travel-thing is a vehicle.

help-ability is emergency services

Beyond that I have to guess — Is group-travel-thing a crew vehicle, making this a crew vehicle for extinguishing?

Or maybe extinguish-group is a fire crew and this is a vehicle for fire crews?

Either way I feel like the author is using a lot more word-parts than they should have to for what is (clearly in the picture) better described as a pump truck.

Its more like "assistance for firefighting group vehicle".

I think the biggest difficulty when starting out is that you don't know common endings and syllable structure, and so it can be hard to parse where the morphological boundaries lie. It's much easier once you understand those, though you will still find instances where two components are combined in an unintuitive (for the learner) way, particularly if the translation maps to a (apparently) indivisible root in the learner's language.

Hilfe – help
Leistung – action (closest translation for this context)
-s- to make it sound less awkward
Lösch – root of the verb "extinguish"
Gruppe – group
-n- to make it sound less awkward (Gruppen being the plural, is incidental)
fahr – root of the verb "drive" or "go" in the context of vehicles Zeug – basically "thing"; hence Fahrzeug = vehicle