AMD 2 - Benjamin Oztalay

I read Mark Twain's "The Awful German Language", and I don't think I've laughed more studying language. His rants and comparisons and descriptions are pretty hilarious, and he really illustrates the problems he found with German.

One of the interesting things I noticed right off the bat is that his English, that is, English from 1880, sometimes feels a bit like the German he was describing. Lots of pieces of sentences out of the order you might expect to see them in, which makes it necessary to hold a bunch of stuff in your head before you get to the part of the sentence that brings it all together into something that means something. For example, there's this sentence:

"We have the Parenthesis disease in our literature, too; and one may see cases of it every day in our books and newspapers: but with us it is the mark and sign of an unpracticed writer or a cloudy intellect, whereas with the Germans it is doubtless the mark and sign of a practiced pen and of the presence of that sort of luminous intellectual fog which stands for clearness among these people."

That probably has to do with the fact that English came from German, and has been branching further over time. It used to be that nouns were always capitalized in English, as well.

This article didn't necessarily introduce me to any new difficulties the German language has, but it certainly showed me the extent to which German's stranger facets can be stretched in practice. The separable verb has never been as frightening as it was after I saw the "depart" example, where "de" was said miles before "part", and entire clauses were stuffed between the two. It also made me nervous for learning Genitive and Dative and such, it sounds like a lot of memorization.

Things like this make me wonder how one becomes fluent in a language like German, or if anyone actually is. Do people in Germany just let small grammar mistakes slide, since it would be difficult to keep up with all of the tiny variations on adjectives and articles and nouns? And is spoken German anywhere near as confusing as written German? It would be difficult to construct such complex sentences on the fly while you speak, but it's a different matter if you're writing them.

Mark Twain spoke for a bit about the softness of German words used to describe eventful or intense things, like explosions and such. I think I would disagree with him on that front, since, to me, at least, German sounds more intense in general than English does. For the swearing example, things like "Damn it!" in English feel more like attempts at getting the same hard-consonanty sound that something like "Mein Gott!" has in German, although Mark Twain argued that the German version is softer, almost fluffy.