Why do we start with these?

Like all languages, German is flexible and allows for inventiveness.
But the ease with which you can form German compound nouns is a distinctive feature of that language.There is basically no limit to the variations of compound nouns you can build in German.

In modern German, especially in technical registers, you'll find an extensive use of compound nouns.
Mark Twain described the pervasive use of long German compound nouns in an appendix to his book, A Tramp Abroad, an account of his adventures across Europe. If you'd like to read an extract of the text, often printed as an essay entitled, "The Awful German Language," click:
http://www.fln.vcu.edu/struwwel/awful.html.

What are compound nouns?

Click anywhere in the picture below to see some examples of compound nouns formed from two nouns:

You may be tempted to look up an unfamiliar compound noun in the dictionary. Because authors sometimes create compound nouns for a particular text, just for the particular occasion, you may not find all of them in a dictionary, particularly if you have a compact dictionary.

Fortunately, the meanings of compound nouns can often be deduced from the meanings of their individual components, which themselves are to be found in the dictionary.

As with other words, you may try to deduce the meaning of a compound noun from the context. That failing, and the noun being absent from your dictionary, there are seven steps to decode and understand compound nouns.

Let's look at these in the grammar sections of this chapter, step by step!

• The first compound nouns you find will probably be those that contain a word you already recognize,
  though the rest may be unknown.

• If you don't find a word in the dictionary, ask yourself if it could be a compound noun