AMD 3 - Emily Kaulius

For this AMD, I decided to do what many of you did for the last AMD; I read Mark Twain's "The Awful German Language" and "The Horrors of the German Language." I found "The Awful German Language" to be a unique mixture of hilarious and informative. I was chuckling while learning. Why can't all school be this way? Oh well...

Twain wrote of many of the things I have found to be incredibly frustrating about learning German. One of the first things he wrote about was the genders of nouns. I'm not completely new to this idea; I took French in high school. In French, there are only two genders, unlike German. In French, the genders of nouns actually make some sense. Most nouns that end in an "e" are feminine and those that don't are generally masculine. Simple. In German, as we have come to know, there are few rules with many exceptions.

I greatly enjoyed Twain's "The Horrors of the German Language." I know not every language translated perfectly into another, but I didn't know how hilariously horribly German literally translated into English.

As much as we complain about the German language, we tend to forget about how complicated the English language is. The same word can be pronounced different ways (like the word bow). There are all sorts of irregular verbs. Thank goodness we're not learning English as a second language. That's all I have to say about that.