Deutsche Sprache schwere Sprache

[ckarl]

I'm glad I didn't have to learn German as a second language because I happen to be German. For those of you who do and are in despair because the German language seems to have more exceptions than rules: you are not the only one. Read here what Marc Twain writes about "The Awful German Language": http://eserver.org/langs/the-awful-german-language.txt

[Antoine]

Ha ha! Very funny read. And so true...

Most of the difficulties described by Mark Twain are difficulties that I'm still encountering in my German learning adventure: long words, different cases to decline with, genders to memorize, etc.

In the past, I had the wrong assumption that German was close to English, to the extent that Spanish was close to French for example. When I started studying, and the more I've delved into that language, the more I realized that this was untrue. A French reader can sometimes understand a Spanish text, while an English reader cannot do the same with a German text, without prior knowledge of the language. Hence more efforts needed to memorize and learn German vocabulary.

Furthermore, and although it's been some time now that I've started taking German lessons, I'm still unsure sometimes of the placement of words within a sentence. At some occasions, my teacher would tell me that case-A and case-B are doable, but at other occasions that same teacher would point out that case-C might be wrong or that case-D has a completely different meaning, because the placement of the words changes the emphasis.

Ending with Twain's funny words:
[...] and keeps on declining it until the common sense is all declined out of it [...]