Oh, I wanted to share, what I consider to be my biggest failure in learning German: A little, but nigh omnipresent word - bzw. Well, it's an abbreviation, which stands for a much longer word - beziehungsweise. I've probably seen it a thousand times, and still have to pause and make a conscious effort to assign it a meaning. And I'm never certain that I picked the right one. It's usually given two definitions: "or" and "respectively". It's usually easy to discard the second one (I don't think I've ever seen it in a case where there were parallel listings of things, if that makes sense). But that "or" is more complicated. I mean, I could just pretend that it's this simple. But there is a simple word for "or" in German - "oder". The first definition of "bzw." actually carries with it a trail of synonyms: "or rather", "more exactly", etc. I mean, they're listed as synonyms, but they aren't really, I don't think, except it can be impossible to tell which one is meant if you put a blank between two words. And to complicate matters more, it's derived from the noun "Beziehung" which means "relationship". At least, for me that's very confusing.

Anyway, I don't know if you've encountered it yet, but be prepared.