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The Awful German Language (1880)
- mikestew 8y agoEven if you don't know a word German, it's Mark Twain, and therefore well worth a read. If you don't know German, the essay makes you want to learn German so that you, too, can suffer along with the author.
- dmlorenzetti 8y agoAlso this bit from Connecticut Yankee "She had exactly the German way; whatever was in her mind to be delivered, whether a mere remark, or a sermon, or a cyclopedia, or the history of a war, she would get it into a single sentence or die. 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."
- escherplex 8y agoTrue. German sticks auxillary verbs in the middle of a sentence and main verbs at the end. Knew a guy from Lufthansa who joked that sometimes he would attend lectures with orators delivering long sentences and sometimes wouldn't know what was being referenced until the end of a sentence when the main verb showed up two minutes later.
- spiralx 8y agoWhich is why I've read that jokes - where the format is setup and then the twist - are hard to express in German :)
- mitchty 8y agoHeh, its honestly not that bad of a language, and has undergone two reforms (maybe 3? I forget) since this document was created. The "awful" parts of German are in some ways its saving grace. Example: surfing is Wellenreiten, literally wave-riding or riding waves. This whole thing is all over German with compound words. Its really no different conceptually from "the old blue car" in English, its just mashed together as a single compound word without spaces. You get used to it fast and then get to (maybe) impress your friends by belting out insanely long words in German.
- louisswiss 8y agoThose aren't the awful parts though, really. I would do away with the 'formal' form of addressing people (Germans have two ways of saying 'you') which serves no real purpose. I'd also get rid of gendered articles and finally simplify word endings (adjective endings can go for a start)!
- kaybe 8y agoMany people feel that having a formal way to address people is useful. It allows you to express very quickly how close you want to have them to you. A stranger you don't like? Formal. A stranger who seems to be your own age and from similar circumstances? Try using non-formal and see how they react. The most beautiful form of this is 'Sie Arschloch', I think. At the same time kind of polite and a rude insult.
- wolfgke 8y ago> Many people feel that the having a formal way to address people is useful. It allows you to express very quickly how close you want to have them to you. A stranger you don't like? Formal. A stranger who seems to be your own age and from similar circumstances? Try using non-formal and see how they react. Or when a couple came apart (in conflict). He started to formulate the letters/emails in a overly formal addressing - she was really furious about that, because this sent a clear message to her.
- balfirevic 8y agoMy native language has that distinction and I have never found it useful - it's nuisance at best. I'm thankful it's something I don't have to think about when speaking in English.
- et2o 8y agoAnd two more for plural "you" since (ihr and overloaded Sie). I like having a second person plural. I sometimes say "you guys" (although this is becoming less acceptable) or "you all" since we don't have one.
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- hevi_jos 8y agoGerman is not that hard, specially coming from English, which is a germanic language itself. The Michel Thomas learning audio programs are fantastic for getting a grasp of the language. If you read and read and watch and watch TV,without analyzing what you do you get naturally the feeling of the language, without the suffering. Mark Twain did what 99% of Germans,Austrians,Swiss are never going to do. Stop and overthink it too much. That was probably the most reasonable way to learn German outside Germany in 1880. It is not today. If you are interested in learning any language, I recommend the book "Fluent forever". It tells you how to start leaning a language and all the resources to learn on your own.
- TulliusCicero 8y agoI don't mind most of German except for gender+case+plural+whatever variables giving you like eight different forms of "the" and similar complexity for "a" and for adjective endings, and even impacting suffixes for the noun (end declinations). Having to think ahead to "okay what's the gender of the noun I'm gonna use three words from now...now factor in the case implied by the preposition preceding it...okay it's 'dem' + '-em' + '-en'". Like I'm sure English has similarly complicated bullshit (the spelling is obviously a gigantic dumpster fire), but wow it's like a whole grammar domain I have to think about that doesn't even exist in English. It just feels like German has way more "modifiers" and variants of words.
- rubberpoliceman 8y ago> Having to think ahead to "okay what's the gender of the noun I'm gonna use three words from now. Now, that's interesting. I'm a native speaker of German, and just the other day I realized that one of the mistakes I keep making in English is to make the "a/an" distinction not based on phonetics, but on agreement with the noun, disregarding any words preceding it: I know that it's "an error", not "a error"; but then I also tend to say (or write) "an common error".
- ur-whale 8y ago>Mark Twain did what 99% of Germans,Austrians,Swiss are never going to do. Stop and overthink it too much. The Swiss do not speak German at all. They speak various forms of Swiss-German dialects, which are related to German, but altogether different languages. And very wisely, Swiss-German dialects have entirely done away with all the useless grammatical garbage German is settled with. As a result, Swiss-German - while being far from the most aesthetically pleasing thing to hear - is way easier to learn than hochdeutsch. Yet somehow, you can perfectly express complex thoughts in Swiss-German and still be understood, so all I've read in this thread about how grammatical complexity is a form of error-correction ... sorry I have to call BS.
- simonmales 8y agoAs a foreigner living and working in Germany for a number a years, reading succinct explanations of German grammar is actually quite refreshing. Personally, grammatical concepts in English for me are quite challenging. Now try and learn a language that has complex grammar rules when you don't _actually_ know your own rules is quite imitating.
- org3432 8y agoI found I understood English grammar better after learning German since it's explicit about the cases, syntax, nouns etc. It sort of revealed what the underlining mechanism was that in English was invisible.
- ozzmotik 8y agoseconded; before learning another language that made it explicit rather than implicit, i sorta just took the linguistic structures of English for granted. it wasn't until I studied German that I even really began to truly understand the nature of grammar. I knew it well enough to use proper grammar but not explicitly enough to actually explain why something that was proper (or improper) was what it was
- noonespecial 8y agoSame here. German always follows the rules. You might not like the rules, but it always follows the rules!
- louisswiss 8y agoUntil it doesn't. Is it das Nutella or die Nutella?
- LolNoGenerics 8y agoWhen is it ever die nutella?
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- xae342 8y agoI found whipping through the grammatical logic trees in German, and exceptions, were like the grammatical equivalent of composing a Fuge, or writing a Lisp function on the spot. Eventually the elegant form of the language can be see after struggling with the details. Arthur Schnitzler’s short stories helped me see a soring elegance in the language that wasn’t obvious to me for a while after becoming fluent.
- lucb1e 8y agoReminds me of this joke, the basis of which seems commonly attributed to Mark Twain but as far as I can find, it not actually from him. Not sure what the original is, but here is one of its many copies floating around: https://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/jokes/european-commission.html https://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/jokes/european-commission.html
- dang 8y agoThat definitely wasn't Twain. It originated as a letter to the editor (perhaps to the Economist?) and got revised as people passed it around on the internet. Unfortunately I can't now find the article I once read which traced this. Perhaps someone else can conjure it up.
- spiralx 8y agoHere you go :) http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/05/iorz-feixfuli-m-j-yilz.html http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/05/iorz-feixfuli-m-j-yilz....
- GreeniFi 8y agoI’m not German but spend a lot of time with Germans who are more often than not fantastic fun. And quite “freigeistlich” I find. This is an excellent German stand-up comedian who plies his trade in London: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=48gV9W9UZHk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=48gV9W9UZHk A curious thing that I have noticed that when Germans speak and write English, they often don’t differentiate between 2 previously mentioned subjects or objects. For example: Dave and Andy went to London with lunch and a book. He forgot it at the train station. Is it something in the structure of the German language that means this confusion is created in translation? Ie we are left unclear as to whether it was Andy or Dave who forgot something and whether it was his lunch or his book.
- tannhaeuser 8y agoDon't know about your example, but Germans tend to pack more information into a sentence, particularly in the written form (as Mark Twain rightfully noticed). Actually, I find English somewhat clumsy to write technical documentation in. Using short sentences, I frequently end up in restating things and having to find alternative words and idioms to avoid repetition. Moreover, using relative clause in English isn't quite as powerful as in German. But probably it's just me not being an English native speaker.
- amelius 8y agoWhat I like about English is that it naturally supports gender neutrality. For example: "the user should upload their photo, and then they should press enter", instead of "the user should upload his/her photo and then he/she should press enter".
- rolleiflex 8y agoEnglish still has he / she, so it’s not fully gender neutral, it still has gendered constructs in its ‘runtime’. There are a few fully gender neutral languages, Turkish is one.
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- itissid 8y agoAlso it seems there is a "standard" form of german since 1996: https://www.fluentin3months.com/german-hard-to-learn/ https://www.fluentin3months.com/german-hard-to-learn/
- anoncake 8y agoThe German orthography was reformed in 1996. That did not change the vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation etc, i.e. the language itself. Like any other natural language, German evolves naturally. Also, the orthography had been standardized since 1901.
- Koshkin 8y agoGerman is an amazing, beautiful language. With not much of the vocabulary borrowed from other languages, words actually make sense. From that perspective, German can be seen as the modern equivalent of Latin, and if I were to choose only one language to remain on the entire planet, it would be German (sorry English, Chinese and Spanish). Its sounds are easier for non-native speakers to pronounce - especially compared to English; it seems to be more resistant to frivolous changes, being sensibly conservative. It’s not perfect, but Latin is a dead language, and we did not have a will to adopt it as a universal language - unlike, for example, Israel which had enough determination to revive a dead language (I find it interesting that they, in fact, also considered German for the role of the national language).
- krylon 8y agoAs a German, allow me to respectfully disagree. I think English is far easier to learn. I often find it easier to express my thoughts in English than in German. I do agree that German is a beautiful language, though, and highly recommend reading Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra to anyone who does or does not agree with me on this one.
- this_user 8y agoOne thing that I have noticed about English is that it seems to be more concise. There are things that can be expressed much more elegantly and with fewer word in English, while saying the same thing in German may require a mid-sized sentence.
- wolfgke 8y ago> One thing that I have noticed about English is that it seems to be more concise. There are things that can be expressed much more elegantly and with fewer word in English, while saying the same thing in German may require a mid-sized sentence. As a native German speaker, I disagree. German allows a really concise nominal style that is hard to express in English.
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- zwieback 8y agoI'm German but have been living in the US for 25 yrs and my verdict is that the German grammar is overly and unnecessarily complicated. The pronunciation, on the other hand, is sane, which cannot be said of English.
- pitaj 8y agoIt's not English pronunciation that's wrong, it's the spelling.
- apo 8y agoEnglish grammar is far simpler than German grammar. Eliminating noun genders, declensions, and cases (as English does) is a great simplification over German. I've never understood the need for noun genders and I scratch my head at a society that makes its members memorize such useless information. That said, German pronunciation is more regular than English pronunciation. Every letter combination is in most cases pronounced exactly the same in every word. Take, for example, the vowel combination "ie." No matter where you see it in a German word, it will be pronounced "ee". Likewise, the combination "ei" will always be pronounced "eye." Contrast this with the scattershot pronunciations English has for the same combinations: "Neighbor" uses "ay". "Albeit" and "Atheist" uses "ee-i". "Caffeine" uses "ee". And so on.
- acomjean 8y agoI often wonder if all that extra grammatical baggage and more rigid pronouciation would make it easier for a computer to understand german over english.
- LolNoGenerics 8y agoJust today I had a chat with a friend about a movie named "rogue one". Roug, Rook, Roug, Rook. If feel quite fit writing english but talking - as someone with very litte practice - drives me mad.
- azernik 8y agoThat specific example points to the root cause of most English pronunciation weirdness - an insistence on preserving original spelling for loanwords even if they come from languages with very different orthography. "Rogue" and "chef" are both French loanwords that English still spells as if they were French, not to mention all the Latin loanwords that still give middle-schoolers endless pain.
- howeman 8y agoInterestingly, "chief" is the same word as "chef" just imported from the Normans. French had a consonant shift, while English did not, and then imported the word again with the new pronunciation and spelling.
- carlosgg 8y ago"I heard a Californian student in Heidelberg say, in one of his calmest moods, that he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective." :)
- soperj 8y ago2 favorite words in german: hand = hand schuh = shoe handschuh = glove schlaft = sleep anzug = suit schlaftanzug = pajamas
- DavidSJ 8y agoDon’t forget: Zahn = tooth, Arzt = doctor, Zahnarzt = dentist.
- ziftface 8y agoWell "dentist" is just a fancier way of saying "toothist" so "tooth doctor" doesn't sound too bad.
- hoppelhase 8y agoI think the best thing about compound words is that you can name things you don't know the actual name for.
- chengiz 8y agoThis has several transcribing errors. For example "of the Mud" should be "oh the Mud"; Leg is written instead of Garment once, which makes Leg both neuter and feminine. http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/huckfinn/mtrdg1.html http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/huckfinn/mtrdg1.html is better.
- svat 8y agoI took this article as a starting point to discuss Sanskrit: https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/2953/87 https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/2953/87 (also at https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2014/07/ https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2014/07/) — roughly speaking, w.r.t. deviance from English, Sanskrit is German++.
- quotemstr 8y agoI've always loved this essay. It's a great example of good-natural ribbing that manages to make humor out of the eccentricities of something (a language, in this case) while making it clear that the people who like that thing are fine people. Mark Twain doesn't really hate the German language nor think anything but the best of Germans --- and it comes across in the essay. I'm not sure whether we can still write essays like this today.
- delib 8y agoI think an overlooked aspect of the German-English comparison is the system of tenses. In German, you can get by with basically just two tenses: the present and the perfect. The past tense can almost always be replaced by the perfect when speaking. When you want to express something that lies in the future, you can just use the present and it will in most cases be clear from context. Compare that to English, where the mastery of the tenses (i.e. when to use which tense) is essential. Distinguishing the use of the simple forms from the progressive forms can be tough for non-native speakers. And then there are all the different past tenses: simple past, present perfect, past progressive... in many cases it sounds really strange when these get mixed up. Think of something like: I have gone to the store last night. Or: He never was in New York. (When the speaker means that he has never been.)
- wirrbel 8y agoI agree. I'd add that a lot of people overlook the complexity of English idioms and vocabulary. It is easy to pick up the basics of English, it is much more difficult to get to proficient level for writing a book for example. Imho as a native German I have the impression that with German it's the other way around. In the beginning it's hard. But once people attain a basic level there is not much to learn anymore.
- robaato 8y agoAbsolutely. When I was at school the only grammar I learnt was in Latin, French or German - wasn't taught in English. But as native speaker you read or listen and absorb the "rules". Had a French girl friend for a time who was studying English and linguistics at Agrégation level (masters) - she would sometimes ask me was it better to say X or Y in English. I would usually prefer one because "it sounded right" but often couldn't come up with a reason as to why. Then she might tell me the rule according to her professor - and I almost always found them very convincing!
- kleiba 8y agoThen the teacher lets me softly down with the remark that whenever the word "wegen" drops into a sentence, it always throws that subject into the Genitive case, regardless of consequences -- and that therefore this bird stayed in the blacksmith shop "wegen des Regens." Interestingly, this grammatical rule has changed since Mark Twain's times - minimally in spoken language where the Dative case is commonly used. But also in more formal or more educated contexts, standard German allows the Dative case after "wegen" in certain cases. In general, the Genitive case is used less and less, it seems that German will in the long run only entertain three grammatical cases instead of the current four.
- quonn 8y agoDer Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod.
- ur-whale 8y ago"allows" The very idea that one is "allowed" to say or not say certain things is just so deeply wrong ... How about this criterium instead: did the person you are trying to communicate with actually understand what you wre trying to said.
- vinayms 8y agoAs a speaker of Kannada, a Dravidian language, grammatically, I find Indo European languages strange in general, with all kinds of rules, and all kinds of exceptions to those rules. Eg: verb conjugation and noun genders. I have dabbled with German and Spanish - I really like these two for some reason - and a bit of Russian. Of this family, Sanskrit seems simpler; not sure if that's because it was explicitly systematized (refactored) millennia back, and hence objectively so, or its just subjective since every Indian is made to learn it at a young age. I find Semitic languages, of which I know some Arabic, quite attractive. I love how concisely are ideas encoded in these languages because Dravidian languages are somewhat concise similarly, though not to that extent.
- lolc 8y agoAs a native speaker I can confirm the observations of Mark Twain. What is ignored in such humorous tirades is that every human speaker will push information density to the very limit of understandability. In every language. They will use all the tools available. Sure, the German case system is getting weaker as the centuries go by. And in some situations you will wonder why it's used still. But that doesn't mean the language will be easier to learn once it's gone. As the cases are lost, preposition will be added in many places. The choice of prepositions will likely come from English, which means it's arbitrary from a grammatical point of view. I claim that reaching spoken proficiency requires the same effort in all human languages. If you want to speak at the level of a native, prepare for ten years of study. As a learner you'll use strings of terms that don't follow the arbitrary conventions, and people will have a hard time understanding. It amazes me how many people claim English is easy to learn all while using unfamiliar preposition-verb combinations in unexpected order. You can't leave hard parsing work to the recipient and say it was easy!
- liftbigweights 8y ago> It amazes me how many people claim English is easy to learn People think english is simple because we don't have the gender+conjugation+declension system of many languages. So initially, english appears simple. A boat is a boat is a boat. But everywhere else - from spelling to grammar to phonetics, english is irregular and has so many exceptions that it really requires effort to become native or even fluent. One cow or many cows vs one sheep vs many sheep? One goose or many geese vs one moose vs many moose? Though goose can become gooses if you use it as a verb. Or look at envelope. You pronounce it differently depending on whether you use it as a noun, verb or adjective ( though it might be a regional thing ). And of course the nearly non-systematic accent/emphasis of syllables which you simply have to learn through listening. Whereas languages like latin have fairly consistent and systematic rules for accent/emphasis. And then there is the british insistence on adding a 'u' to words like labor or harbor.
- FabHK 8y agoI've seen this quote attributed to G B Shaw: "English is one of the easiest languages to speak badly, but one of the most difficult to speak well"; however, I can't find a reliable citation. At any rate, I think it captures something about English. As you say, languages like German and French take more effort to learn initially (conjugation and (in German) declension), but then there are only a few ways of expressing something correctly. English has so many synonyms with slightly different connotations and idiomatic nuances that it is hard to master.
- ur-whale 8y agoGerman is - in a way - very similar to Forth and PostScript: you need a stack of potentially infinite depth to parse it.
- amai 8y agoMark Twain was absolutely right. German is in the Top 10 of the most weird languages in the world: https://corplinguistics.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/the-weirdest-languages/ https://corplinguistics.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/the-weirdes...
- FabHK 8y agoObligatory terrible joke: The house of a German professor is on fire. He runs in, shouting "I need to rescue my work from obliteration!" and comes out with a huge tome. He runs in again, mumbling about his magnum opus, and appears again with another volume. The fire fighters warn him that the house might collapse anytime and it's dangerous to go in, but the professor exclaims "But I need to save volume III, it contains all the verbs!" Oh, and while we are at it: My mathematician friend claims that Latin is closed under permutation, while German is closed under concatenation.
- jhanschoo 8y agoI chuckled that Twain humorously was complaining about nouns coming after wegen being in the genitive case. After all, it parallels with the 'of' in English analogue, 'on account of'; 'of' in English is used to mark notions that most Indo-European languages that still retain a genitive would express in the genitive. One still frequently encounters the vestige of the English genitive case: it is the -'s or the -s' that one affixes to words to indicate that the word signifies the possessor of some other word.
- subpixel 8y agoI believe Hungarian has something like 16 cases, making German less difficult to learn that in could be.
- vram22 8y agoI've been learning German slowly over time. As someone else said in this thread, at least some parts of it (more so some of the vocabulary) is not very difficult for people who know English well, which is partly due to English and German having some common historical roots, I've read. E.g. the "Saxon" in the term Anglo-Saxon is from the Saxons, from the Saxony area (part of Germany), or so I've read in the past. One of my favorite German words is entschuldigung, for the sound of it. There's a ring to the thing. Have you seen what I mean? :) https://translate.google.com/#de/en/Entschuldigung https://translate.google.com/#de/en/Entschuldigung