AMD Zwei

Right, so, for this AMD, for lack of creativity on my part, I read what turned out to be Mark Twain’s positively epic essay “The Awful German Language.” I couldn’t have been more pleasantly surprised with what I read. My preliminary thoughts were of what horrible things I would prefer to do to myself than read Mark Twain, but I soon found myself to be worrying for no reason.

The essay itself is about how hard it was to learn German, so it’s perfectly applicable to everyone in Deutsche Einhunderteins. He starts off by talking about how bizarre the examples in his book are. There was a bird “waiting in the blacksmith shop on account of the rain.” Twain, in a trim and proper English sentence, worthy of his status as a legendary writer, critiques the book because no bird would ever do that. How much more similar to a modern student can you get? We always poke fun at our books’ examples (FORT WAYNE). He recognizes how irritating arbitrary gender is, too, which he’s completely correct about.
It was a tad unnerving to read the section on separable verbs. We’re just starting to learn those now, and if they give someone with a command of language like Mark Twain so much trouble, I have no idea how I intend to figure them out at all. When he gave that lovely example, from the German romance novel, it reminded me of Edgar Allen Poe. Poe does the same thing: he inserts subordinate clauses into subordinate clauses into subordinate clauses until you have a sentence that resembles a Russian nesting doll.

Next he talks about what we call German word efficiency. Six uses for Sie/sie, according to Twain, is just too many. After listing them all…She, her, it, them, You-formal, and they, Twain gives his readers a very useful suggestion for figuring out which sie/Sie someone is using! He writes: “This explains why, whenever a person says sie to me, I generally try to kill him, if a stranger.” And this is why Twain came to be such a great writer, I’m sure…

The great part is, over the course of the essay, while I was reading and laughing…I got some review. For instance, I wrote those six uses of Sie/sie without going back and checking beforehand. I remembered them from the essay! I didn’t read all of it, I’ll be honest, but it was pretty dense to read all in one sitting. I’ll come back to it if I get a chance though…maybe to study for the test…