Huh.

No cucumbers in Austria?

That is fabulous. I'd love to see a whole series of these!

mullacc: Re Austria, you'll notice there's no combombre in Belgium either. It's because those countries share languages with their neighbours. Like the US basically.
(This reminds me of a Jon Stewart show where he disses Belgium for not having its own language. It's hard to believe the writers of the show didn't see the similarity with the US.)

An extra factor of confusion is that the Gherkin and the Cucumber are closely related as plants (different cultivars) while the Gherkin like word will refer to either in European languages.
So when a German talks about a Gurke (cucumber) to, let's say, a Dutchman it sounds more like he's referring to an augurk (gherkin).

And that's a basic challenge of learning North-Western European languages; words are often familiar but that doesn't mean you can use them actively in the right way. They're semantic siblings of what you'd expect: different along an unsuspected semantic/cognitive axis. Centuries of interaction, diffusion have created unpredictable similarities, misleading mirror images, trompe l'oreilles.
(I can imagine it's the same for other families of related languages; Slavic, Asian, ...) One encounters so called faux amis: words that seem familiar but mean a rather different thing.
There's a whole genre of comedy related to this obviously.

This mixture of similarity and difference is what makes mefites say about hearing the Dutch language "I almost understand it, but it's as if I had a stroke and it's all just out of reach".

In the Netherlands, a small trade oriented nation, it used to be a middle class point of pride to know all these faux amis for the most proximate languages, and gebildete burghers were wont to scoff at people who get them wrong.

And that's a basic challenge of learning North-Western European languages; words are often familiar but that doesn't mean you can use them actively in the right way.

Or sometimes the words are different, but when you think about it, you can see the relationships between, say, German and English words. My go-to example is flughafen. Now, I don't speak German, but flug sure does seem related to flight, and hafen is pretty similar to haven. Put together, a flight haven is pretty much the same as an airport, isn't it?

It's like lots of German language is but a slight expansion of English vocabulary. At least that's the way it seemed when I traveled there.

Wait, a cucumber and a gherkin are not the same thing?

Ha, Doohickie, Flughafen is a nice example.
German: Flughafen
English: airport
Dutch: luchthaven, vliegveld
Danish: lufthavn
Swedish: flygplats
Norwegian: lufthamn, flyplass

To illustrate the false friends: Let's say I'm in a pub talking to people in German, which is a 2nd language to me. I want to say something about an airport.
While speaking I'll have to chose the right option from the following ones that all sound likely:
Lufthafen
Flugfelt
Flugplatz
Flughafen

They are not always called airports in English.

So I guess that would be Strahlplatz.
No Strahlfelt.
Wait, no, Strahlhafen.