You open a German news site and the top headline reads "Kanzler trifft Präsident." No article before Kanzler, no article before Präsident, and the sentence is grammatically complete anyway. A learner who's built solid German from an app, where every sentence example includes its articles and full verb conjugation, can genuinely stall here, not because the vocabulary is hard, but because headline German follows its own compressed conventions that a full spoken or written sentence doesn't use.
What headline style actually drops
Articles. A full sentence would read "Der Kanzler trifft den Präsidenten" (the chancellor meets the president). The headline drops both der and den entirely: "Kanzler trifft Präsident." This is the single most common headline compression and, once you expect it, the easiest to read past, since the missing article rarely changes which noun means what.
Auxiliary verbs, replaced by a bare participle. A full sentence describing something already announced would use a passive construction with an auxiliary: "Die Reform wurde angekündigt" (the reform was announced). A headline frequently drops the auxiliary entirely and states the participle alone: "Reform angekündigt." There's no verb conjugated for person or tense left in the headline at all, just the participle doing the work of the whole predicate. A reader parsing for a normal finite verb won't find one, because headline style doesn't require it.
The colon construction: topic, then comment
German headlines commonly use a colon to separate a topic from a compressed statement about it: "Bundestag: Abstimmung über neues Gesetz verschoben" (Bundestag: vote on new law postponed). Read literally, this isn't a grammatically complete sentence in the way a spoken or written paragraph would require, it's a topic label followed by a noun phrase plus a participle, and the reader is expected to supply the missing "die Abstimmung wurde verschoben" (the vote was postponed) mentally. This construction is extremely common and worth recognizing on sight as its own headline-specific pattern, not an incomplete or broken sentence.
One more common pattern: dropped auxiliary in the present
Headlines about ongoing or planned events often drop the finite verb even in the present tense, relying on a bare infinitive or noun phrase where a full sentence would need a conjugated verb: "Bahn wieder pünktlich?" (railway punctual again?) leaves out both the article before Bahn and the finite verb sein entirely, standing in for the full question "Ist die Bahn wieder pünktlich?" This compressed question format, noun plus adjective, no verb, no article, shows up constantly in headlines posing a question about a situation, and it reads as a natural, complete headline to a fluent reader precisely because the missing verb is so predictable from context that spelling it out would feel redundant.
Why this specifically catches app-trained readers
App courses build every example as a complete, grammatically standard sentence, because that's what a clean drill needs: subject, conjugated verb, object, article included. Headline German is deliberately the opposite: maximally compressed, articles and auxiliary verbs cut wherever the meaning survives without them. A reader who's only ever seen full-sentence German can genuinely misparse "Reform angekündigt" as an error or an unfamiliar construction, when it's actually a completely standard, everyday convention that every regular reader of German news recognizes instantly.
How to read a compressed headline
The reliable move is to mentally restore what's missing rather than search for a verb that isn't there. A bare participle at the end of a headline noun phrase is almost always standing in for a passive construction: supply "wurde" or "ist ... worden" (was, or has been) in your head, and the headline reads as a normal statement. A colon separating a place, institution, or topic from a noun phrase is a topic-comment structure, not a broken sentence: read the part before the colon as "regarding X" and the part after as the actual news. Neither of these patterns requires memorizing a new grammar rule, only recognizing that headline German follows its own compression conventions distinct from the full sentences an app course, or the article's own body text once you keep reading, will use.
The body text underneath a headline almost always reverts to standard, fully conjugated sentence structure within the first paragraph, articles and finite verbs restored. Treating the headline as a distinct, compressed genre, rather than the model for how the whole article is written, keeps the compression from feeling like it's spreading into text that's actually following ordinary German grammar throughout.