Recommended Reading
Having been raised in 2 languages – German as a mother/father tongue and Hebrew, the language of Israel, where I spent the first 12 years of my life – I was lucky enough to acquire ‘2 languages for the price of 1’ without any struggle and hard work.
However, later on in life I did learn what it is like to learn a new language, struggle through the grammar, get one’s mouth to form and pronounce the strange new sounds and then to use those to communicate with the ‘natives’ of another country. I realised at first hand that language learning can be a struggle. On my travels through the USA, following a year of 'au-pairing' over there, I bought myself the 'Mark Twain Anthology', in which I came across his essay about ‘The Awful German Language’. I was already a Mark Twain fan at the time, but after reading this essay, I loved his writing even more. At the same time, I realised that in order for non-German speakers to appreciate the humour in this essay, their knowledge of German must be pretty advanced. His descriptions of the oddities of German were so grammar-based that you had to have a good grasp of it to fully enjoy it. I loved this essay so much that, as a novice teacher, I sometimes read bits of it out to my students, even to those on beginner’s level. While I was nearly crying with laughter, my students used to smile politely, uncomprehendingly. That’s when I realised what ‘awful’ German grammar points I would still need to cover so that they could also laugh about Twain’s English translation of the German extract of a story:
"The trunks being now ready, he DE- after kissing his mother and sisters, and once more pressing to his bosom his adored Gretchen, who, dressed in simple white muslin, with a single tuberose in the ample folds of her rich brown hair, had tottered feebly down the stairs, still pale from the terror and excitement of the past evening, but longing to lay her poor aching head yet once again upon the breast of him whom she loved more dearly than life itself, PARTED." (Mark Twain: ‘The Awful German Language’ – an essay)
– If you, dear reader, are able to see the funny side of this here, then you are probably at least on GCSE level or above. You would have learned about 'separable verbs' and be familiar with that rather strange concept. By the way, this is of course a very satirical way of looking at German, taking its grammatical intricacies to the extreme. Therefore, if you have not yet reached GCSE level, please don’t let this sentence put you off! It is possible to construct much shorter, and yet good, German sentences.
I know that since Mark Twain wrote this article, language teaching has changed dramatically. The German learning experience he had whilst visiting Germany for a prolonged period of time is worlds apart from the way German, or any foreign language, is taught today. And although I believe that grammar is an absolutely essential part of the language – like the spine to the body (of vocabulary in this case) – language learning nowadays has got a much more fun, hands-on, communicative approach which should put no one off learning a language like German anymore – not even after reading Twain’s ‘The Awful German Language’.
Yet, nowadays, with some more years of teaching German under my belt, I usually wait at least until my students have reached GCSE level before I dare to read out excerpts of the essay – just to be on the safe side.
Google the essay or find it http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/awfgrmlg.html
