Is German really 'awful'?

Let's explore whether German really is awful. And use code ROBWORDS at the link below to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan:

In 1880, Mark Twain wrote his essay "The Awful German Language". In it, he listed what he saw as the many drawbacks of the language that he had spent years trying to learn. Are his criticisms fair or just the rantings of a frustrated student? Let's find out.

Check me out on the web, on Twitter & TikTok:

[mapwiz-sfyt]

There's also the old joke about the guy who started reading an engrossing German novel, but when he came to the end, he found the last page had been torn out. Which was a tragedy, because it contained all the verbs.

[hhgygy]

One of the most famous contemporary Hungarian writers, Peter Esterhazy was taught German when he was a child.
He was too lazy to learn the gender of every single German noun (no such thing exists in Hungarian) and quickly realised that if you use the diminutive forms like -lein, -chen etc. then all nouns are neutral.
So he started using words like Tischlein, Bleistiftchen, Papierchen etc. so as to avoid learning the proper genders.
He was a smart boy wasn't he?

[KonsharPaHuvet]

As a Swede, I want to vehemently defend the German norm of stringing words together, especially when it comes to nouns. If it's one thing, then it needs to have one word. This is made all the more clear when the English language is super inconsistent when it comes to deciding whether something should be one word or two. Case and point: Policeman -> Police Officer.

[tiffanymarie]

Mark Twain still being funny today really speaks to his skill as a satirist.

[Villain.van.Bobbov]

In defense of Mädchen (girl) being neuter: it is a diminutive form (of "Magd", nowadays no longer in use), and all diminutive forms are neuter in German.

[arthurjankowski]

A Greek teacher of English and German once told me about the difficulties of learning these two languages. English starts easy, but remains an easy way up a hill endlessly. German starts with a high mountain of grammar, but once you climbed the peak it gets easy and safe. She never felt save in English but did so in German, though she never had lived in an English or German speaking country, just worked in tourism in Crete.

[gusbert]

You missed the best quote from this essay: "Some German words are so long that they have a perspective."

[tibone]

Wer kennt sie nicht? Die nette, alte Dame, die gerne Katzen futtert.

[apmoy]

In Greek too, the _girl_ is neuter and the _turnip_ is feminine

[theanyktos]

As a native German speaker I absolutely have to disagree with Mr. Twain on one thing. No one can learn English in 30 hours. Don't get me wrong, it's easier than a lot of languages, but not 30 hours easy. The spelling vs. pronounciation thing alone... oof.

[DrawingLivfe]

Everyone always talks about "den Schmetterling" - the butterfly, but no one talks about "die Libelle" - the dragonfly.

[troelspeterroland]

I studied German in high school at the time of the fall of the Berlin wall and I vividly remember how the foreign minister of West Germany, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, arrived in Prague in order to address the East German refugees who had sought shelter in his country's embassy there. "Ich bin nach Prag gekommen um Ihnen mitzuteilen, dass heute Ihre Ausreise...". He was interrupted by the jubilation of the crowd before he made it to the verb in order to tell them if their outward passage had been approved or rejected. I was a little amazed by how they understood each other but it gave me great hopes for the German reunification.

[bradvanbrauman]

“When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.”
-Mark Twain

[TheEJFK]

Let's be fair: Is there any language a native English speaker would find easy?

[OmgPuppies]

The modern perception of German as angry and violent-sounding isn't just because of the obvious historical causes, it's because of Bühnendeutsch. In the early days of radio and movies, German actors and politicians were intentionally trained to speak in a certain way that genuinely did sound angry and violent. This is because sound quality was low, and this way of speaking is easier to understand over a staticky radio.

[PotatoSweet-gimb]

Just wanted to point out that if you were to replace the „danken“ with „töten“, you would have to say „Ich möchte die alte Dame…“ not „Ich möchte der alten Dame“ at 9:37, as in that case the sentence would be in the accusative case, not the dative.

[jeepien]

My favorite Twain quote about German comes from his _Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court_:
"Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth."

[gwh]

My old German professor told us that the reason German back-loaded the main verbs was because we remember best, what we have heard last.

[that_one_momo_guy]

This was, for a lousy language learner who spent years in Germany trying hard to learn the language and felt horrifically ashamed to speak english with his german friends all along until he did therapy and learned to be kinder with himself, cathartic.

[cogspace]

Twain was a satirist. There are elements of truth, like in all jokes, but his tongue is firmly planted in his cheek. It's fun to make fun of something you love, and he very clearly loved German. And I couldn't agree more with his appraisal of how soft and gentle the language often is, when not being screamed by a madman. "Schmetterling" to me sounds almost precisely like "fluttering" or "shivering, " and if either of those words strikes one as offensive, well, perhaps there are too many madmen screaming in English these days...