German is certainly not an easy language. Many people even claim that it is one of the most difficult languages in the world1. But what is the point of comparing it to other living languages which, for English speakers even worse, only consist of glottal stops? And what is it exactly that makes German so hard to learn? Bastian Sick, who is the author of the Der Dativ ist dem Genetiv sein Tod book series and who works as a journalist for the Spiegel magazine, is a major contributor to the insight that German obviously is a demanding language and challenging to learn and use for non-native speakers; had already understood impressively well in the 19th century. This is going to be a critical essay about the intricacies of the German language and how they are depicted in Mark Twain’s The Awful German Language2. In the following, I am going to outline the great writer’s perspective on the German language and I will also continue to evaluate on it from today’s point of view. Read on

  1. That’s certainly not true given the almost unpronounceable guttural phonemes of Mongolian languages enriched with an over boarding grammar structure, for example. [↩]
  2. If not marked separately, all subsequent quotations can be found in: Mark Twain, The Awful German Language, Aufbau Verlag, Berlin, 1963. [↩]