AMD 2- The Awful German Language

This was quite an interesting read, which would be good reasoning for why Hartmut recommended it. I thought Mark Twains approach to the essay was brilliant in his attack of the dative, accusative, and nominative cases and how they effect different words in different ways. He also uses great examples for ways in which the German language is generally illogical. The biggest exception for him seemed to be the capitalization of nouns because it is unmistakable for what it is, unless it is a persons name.

I think my favorite part of the essay is about the separable verb. The example for this was especially good in my opinion:

"The trunks being now ready, he DE- after kissing his mother and sisters, and once more pressing to his bosom his adored Gretchen, who, dressed in simple white muslin, with a single tuberose in the ample folds of her rich brown hair, had tottered feebly down the stairs, still pale from the terror and excitement of the past evening, but longing to lay her poor aching head yet once again upon the breast of him whom she loved more dearly than life itself, PARTED."

Given that all of his examples are a bit over the top in illustrating his point, I think this one is the best because of its length and clarity in describing a situation to the "T" and using some of the most eloquent wording. It is hard to picture this in the English language. Clearly we just have very different structures for our sentences.

I also like the way he talks about the language in the way that you can combine words together to make very complex looking and sounding words that are much longer than most. I guess we have something like this in the English language too, but it is definitely more extreme in German. I feel like they do it a little bit more often than we do and they end up with much longer words than we do in these cases.

I studied German for four years in high school in what I considered to be a very kind, but terrible teacher. He just didn't care as much about our learning than other teachers do. But from those four years, I did get a good feel for the language just through general exposure and repetition. Based on this understanding of the material, I felt like I could agree with Mark Twain on multiple levels within this essay. I don't have a knowledge base nearly as thorough as he does, but it is still moderate, and I felt like it helped me understand a lot of what he was saying pretty well. I think this made the essay a little bit easier, and definitely more interesting to read.