The Awful German Language (1880)

Comparing German to Other Languages

• Several commenters argue that much of what Twain mocks in German (gender, noun paradigms, exceptions) also exists in French, but German adds cases, verb‑final structures, and separable verbs on top.
• French number formation (e.g., quatre‑vingt‑dix‑neuf) and Danish vigesimal numbers are cited as their own “grammatical torture devices,” though native speakers say they treat forms like quatre‑vingt‑dix as single lexical items.
• English is criticized for chaotic spelling–pronunciation mappings and place-name pronunciations; French for silent letters and conditional pronunciation through liaison.

Correcting Twain & Historical Usage

• Some of Twain’s concrete examples are called flat‑out wrong or obsolete: e.g., the “rain” case (wegen des Regens vs colloquial wegen dem Regen), and noun genders (tomcat, wife, girl).
• The essay is framed as 19th‑century satire; several note Twain actually spoke German well and also lampooned English and French.
• Older words like Weib and phrases like Wein, Weib und Gesang trigger a long debate: some see them as affectionate or context‑dependent; others as historically sexist or reducing women to pleasure objects. There’s disagreement over how much modern moral judgment should be applied to past usage.

Learning and Using German

• Many non‑native speakers describe German grammar as formidable: 3 genders (+ plural), 4 cases, article/adjective declension tables, verb clusters at sentence ends, and many exceptions.
• Some say native Germans themselves often make grammar or spelling mistakes and that mastering articles and adjective endings is hard even for them.
• A recurring theme is that current teaching materials emphasize rules and fill‑in‑the‑blank exercises but don’t give enough whole‑sentence practice, leading to knowledge without fluency.
• Others counter that every language has quirks—English phonology, French spelling, Slavic cases—so German is “hard but not uniquely awful.”

Compound Nouns and Technical Domains

• German (and Dutch, Norwegian, etc.) compounding is praised for precision: long, on‑the‑fly compounds are immediately understandable to natives and heavily used in law and business.
• This creates challenges in software and documentation: teams often mix English for technical terms with German for domain concepts, yielding very long identifiers and “code‑switching code.”
• Some argue German isn’t uniquely more expressive than English; compounds typically correspond to short English phrases, though sometimes without a neat single‑word equivalent.

Pronunciation, Stereotypes, and Dialects

• There’s disagreement on whether German is inherently “harsh”: some hear glottal stops and gutturals as aggressive; others find Dutch or some English accents rougher, and point to softer regional or dialectal German.
• Several note German is a dialect continuum (High vs Low German, Swiss German, etc.), and related languages like Dutch and Afrikaans sit on the same continuum, blurring “language vs dialect” boundaries.

Grammar, Gender, and Cases

• Grammatical gender is widely viewed as a learning burden; some would abolish it, others defend it as aiding disambiguation and adding redundancy in noisy communication.
• Discussions also touch on Dative vs Genitive shifts, spelling reforms (e.g., Schifffahrt), and broader prescriptivist vs descriptivist tensions in how “proper” German is defined.