The Awful German Language by Mark Twain
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- Опубліковано 18 вер 2024
- The Awful German Language, by Mark Twain (1880)
as read by Luke Amadeus Ranieri
German was my first foreign language, which I learned in high school and I have loved it ever since. But this take on the tongue by Mark Twain (né Samuel Clemens) is quite funny, and I hope you think so as well! May it inspire you to learn German (or to commiserate with others who do). Enjoy, and leave your comments below!
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The narrator did an amazing job. He captures the sarcastic tone of Twain perfectly.
Thanks!
Yes, he does. However, his German pronunciation need much work.
Absolutely!
Just wait till you hear him do it in Latin!
*hint hint*
German grammar is hard to deal with.
English spelling can be mastered through tough thorough thought though
Wow!
Poetic
hahahahaha
throughout trough
"English spelling can be mastered through tough thorough thought, though." FTFY.
Somebody who hates the English language as much as he hates the German language could write a whole library. 😂
😂
É a minha hora de brilhar.
@@Dankschon alemão é até aceitável, mas inglês...
@@Gadottinho
Why?
@@Gadottinho How? At least there's a method to English's madness. German pretends to be a structured language, but has more exceptions than the rule.
Just imagine if Mark Twain tried Hungarian.
Hungarian doesn't have grammatical gender. It has more grammar cases but they are easier to learn than the four that German has.
@@Kikkerv11 I think agglutination, and also the orthography are the most difficult for English speakers
@@eveningstar7048 Hungarian is very exotic and you will have to learn a lot of new linguistic concepts, however, I think let's say "aliens" might find Hungarian easier to learn than Indo-European languages like English, German etc. Hungarian is only considered hard because it is not Indo-European.
Or Finnish, for that matter :D
@@eveningstar7048 Agglutination can be easy, just look at Esperanto. And it's more regular than conjugations and declensions.
I don't know any Hungarian, but isn't it supposed to be read just like it's written? The impression I got from an introductory video was that the orthography is pretty straight forward.
Hearing Mark Twain joke about how soft German sounds, when nowadays Americans generally think the opposite, is funny. "Schlacht" is definitely not a word I would call soft. :D
I am Spanish and I like how german sounds . It doesn't sound harsh for me .
2 WWs changes things about the perception of a culture.
@@TheMaru666 Me resulta difícil creerte mas me complace oírlo no obstante.
English back then was spoken very deliberately. Over time, English speakers throughout the world have resorted to sounding like they're always half-drunk in less than 100 years.
@@TheZenytram radio optimized intonation may have contributed.
I burst into the loudest guffaws and choking laughter when I heard, “That explains why, whenever a person says sie to me, I generally try to kill him, if a stranger.” I honestly thought I misheard it! Went back. Double checked, and doubled the laughter. Oh Mark Twain! I love him! 12:07
Hahaha me too!
Ging mir ganz genauso! 🤣
"It is as bad as Latin" 😄👌 Das nehme ich als großes Lob 😁
Both languages are great
Sollten Sie auch
Allerdings! (Although to be fair I despaired over Latin like the unfortunate Mark Twain despaired over German and I'm glad I'm rid of it forever ^^).....Next year I'm gonna be learning French.....wish me luck please
Hoptman Ruprecht Gerngroß.
At least in latin Girls are actually female...if you are german you understand (EIN MÄDCHEN...come on)
Funny that Twain characterizes German as a soft, romantic, and even meek language, whereas most English speakers today describe it as rough, gruff, and angry. The confusing grammar and overly long compound words are treated about the same, though.
I think that’s because Americans mostly base their perceptions of German on Schulz in “Hogan’s Heroes,” or Hitler’s bombastic speeches. I’ve never thought German sounded any harsher or angrier than any other language, if the speaker wasn’t speaking harshly or angrily.
It changed in the first world war when British propaganda characterized German as ugly and harsh. The second world war made it even worse. My impression is that it is again changing and people are viewing our language more positive now.
@@herrgoldmann2562 Honestly, if you want a harsh sounding Germanic language, look no farther than Amsterdam Dutch. :-)
Perhaps because they already have a rough time with their first language?
@@sazji
Dutch sounds like English with Wernicke's aphasia.
When I was studying high school German, I translated the statement about literary Germans: Wenn ein literarischer Deutscher in einen Satz untertaucht, sieht man ihn nicht bis er auf dem anderen Ufer seines Ozeans mit dem Verb im Mund auftaucht.
Fürwahr, wie tragische Komik muss es dem Aussenstehenden erscheinen. Indes, für uns Muttersprachler ist dieser Umstand mehr Gepflogenheit, denn Ausnahme.
It’s sometimes funny if a interpreter must wait for the verb before he can start to translate. 😁
@@-cirad-
The german language has its sentences in a V2-Order. It means the verb is the second thing in the sentence. Not necessarily the second word. At least in main clauses.
@@HalfEye79 While true, the verb you find at the second position might not actually carry any meaning. Consider:
Gestern habe ich sehr lange gearbeitet.
Indeed, "habe" is a verb, but it is merely a grammatical construct. The verb actually containing meaning is "gearbeitet".
Though I will admit, so many people complaining about the verb being at the end does annoy me, as well. Since it only happens in certain tenses. The previous sentence could easily be expressed as:
Gestern arbeitete ich sehr lange.
Different tense, but same meaning. Now the verb is definitely in the second position. (Though it has to be said, most German speakers will prefer the first one)
@@Yotanido
The problem, many people have is when the term within the verbal brackt is very large. So Somebody said something like this:
Letztes Jahr habe ich den entscheidenden Elfmeter in der Weltmeisterschaft im Finale gegen Italien verschossen.
Both parts of the verb are very far away. But there is a possibillity, you can use with the usage of "und zwar". Instead of former sentence you can say:
Letztes Jahr habe ich einen Elfmmeter verschossen; und zwar den entscheidenenden Elfmeter im Weltmeisterschaftsfinale gegen Italien.
I hope people get, that Twain actually liked the language and tried to learn it for some good reasons. He also hired German nannies for his daughters and wrote "Gott sei dir gnädig, o meine Wonne" on the tombstone of his wife.
May it rest in peace (- and he also.)
- Okay, I do see that he managed to get her a feminine gender for the purpose!
He stole one of his stories from the German translation of a Danish story by Blicher, btw.
@@peterfireflylund which one?
@@duncanwalduck7715 he really liked the stone
@@peaceo100 “Tom Sawyer, Detective” based on “Præsten i Vejlbye” (based on a true story). Twain and Blicher’s versions are very different so I don’t Twain did anything wrong. West Side Story is Romeo and Juliet which is Pyramus and Thisbe, Clueless is Emma, Bridget Jones’ Diary is Pride and Prejudice, etc. Great artists steal.
I find you most amazing not only because of your absurd language skills, charisma and fluency, but also because of your unusual reading ability. Good job, Luke.
That’s very kind of you! Thanks for listening
I must concur with you, good sir. And as a native german (well, swiss german) speaker, I rather enjoyed the awful brilliance of our terribly confusing language being described by Mark Twain, as read by Mister *Polý*ester *Mathy*oo.
As a german I never thought of all these problems that he pointed out 😅 but he is right. Especially the problem with long sentences and parenthesis.... 🙈 I do it in my english writing as well. Now I know why the comma is not so popular in the english language. We Germans just love our "Nebensätze" and our "Einschübe".
Fun-Fact: You read the english parts really well and with a pleasant voice but the german words sounded a bit harsh and you spoke with a french accent. 😂 Overall it was nicely done but just a bit unexpected.
German frequently uses what would be considered in English to be "run-on" sentences: unnecessarily long, grammatically complicated, and confusing. In English, they're considered to be bad writing, and would be broken up into more than one sentence. Yet some German writers seem to take pride in producing such sentences.
Then again, the English never had the same passion for compound nouns like that of their Saxon cousins, the Germans: "Fliegerabwehrkanone" is intimidatingly long to English speakers, thus with English you get literally, "aircraft defense canon", or the more usual, "anti-aircraft gun".
(By the way, the abbreviation for "Flliegerabwehrkanone" in German is "Flak", which is where English gets "flak". Today in English, "flak" can also mean "criticism".)
@@Tflexxx02 Au contraire! When I was exposed to Cicero's texts I adopted his style to an extent also in my german writing and was told it was "bad style". I did not care though. If Cicero is praised using sentences covering whole pages, why should I be punished for building too long sentences, which were only of half the length?
@@Tflexxx02 It is quite obvious there, that english (especially that of the american sort) is a very deterioriated language with low complexity (but strong issues of it’s own). The spoken german language is kept pretty simple, and many authors of trivial works use a rather simple and blunt style. But in literature one considers language as a form of art, not just a method of getting meaning across. If it was otherwise it would be totally reasonable to write in short statements, but as it is such, a good german author would try to shape the language into the form he likes. And one style would be to construct the sentence as an architect of language, to enrich the dull meaning and add texture to it.
Maybe this is sometimes overdone, but consider that in latin this is done even more extremely.
There are quite a few english authors who adopt a more complex linguistic architecture, but, well, maybe Mark Twain is not the *best* example.
@@TheVoitel English: "a very deteriorated language". I don't know what that means. Yet it has become the lingua franca of the world.
@@Tflexxx02 Many of the more complicated features of the english language were replaced by more simple features. Thus the language became rather simple and uncomplex. But the language also has lost much of its expressive ability. For example, just compare how much stronger Shakespearean english was.
But this does pose little problems for adoption, as it makes leaning the language much easier.
But modern english is very much a functional language with little inherent beauty.
Of course english is not alone there. Modern german is currently degenerating at a remarkably fast rate.
By the way: Germans don't particularly like the very long compound words! But we always like to deliver them to native English speakers because they just expect them, and then they feel validated.
ive learned german and i really love the compound words, its an eloquent subtle layer of expression, which sounds better than english compound words (which are more casual and not so official) because of the joining letters used in german. the super long compound words are just jokes, or made by people who think they are smarter than they are lol
Die schrecklichlangadjektivfeindliche Deutschen sind relativ selten.(The terribly-long-adjective-hostile people are relatively rare).
Yes, they have such childlike minds....
It's always entertaining, as a native French speaker, to hear English folks complain about grammatical gender (and oftentimes, talk of it as if it's specific to the language they're learning).
One should learn that grammatical gender is different from actual gender. In German, it's even more the case than in Romance languages, I believe.
I do, however, understand the struggle. As a learner of German myself, it is quite disturbing to learn that my feminine Moon (la Lune) becomes masculine (der Mond), and that my masculine Sun (le Soleil) becomes feminine (die Sonne). I will move towards la table (fem) and will sit at den Tisch (masc). Someone will bring me une assiette (fem), and I will thank them when they put den Teller (masc) in front of me. I will proceed to eat la viande (fem) that lies in said plate, and upon tasting, I will find my meal not salty enough, and will therefore ask someone to pass me le sel (masc). I will also drink some eau froide (fem) from un verre (masc). Those four words being of course, in German, of a third gender that never existed in my life before starting to learn this language. Indeed, I am actually eating das Fleisch, to which I added das Salz, and next to my plate stands das Glas from which I just drank, which of course contains kaltes Wasser.
(No joke, when thinking about my examples, I thought, before checking, that "Fleisch" was either masculine or feminine... Thank God we live at the age of online dictionaries)
But, even though I understand the struggle, it's still funny to hear English native speakers treat grammatical gender in general as this sort of weird mystical creature that seems to only exist for the sole purpose of torturing their mind.
S.v.p. pourquoi ne pas le dire en français, ce serait tellement mieux!
Auriez vous oublié que Poly Mathy est pour le multilinguisme, et adepte du latin?
Everyone knows there's a difference between real and grammatical. The problem lies in that... grammatical gender serves no purpose.
@@claudeborrel4265 Ce n'est pas tout le monde qui parle latin ou même une langue romane dans les commentaires de ses vidéos, cependant. Je tenais à m'assurer que le plus de gens comprennent.
@@Frygonz If it serves no purpose, then why is it so common even today?
Just because your language doesn't have grammatical gender doesn't mean it serves no purpose in other languages.
That being said, it's true that in languages like French, it's not as useful as it used to be, because of erosion, among other things. I think it's likely grammatical gender is going to disappear in this language, though it will probably take centuries.
But in other languages, grammatical gender is still very important and useful. Chiefly, it can help with keeping track of which adjectives goes with which noun. Of course, syntax also often plays a role in this, but redundancy is a very common and useful thing in languages around the world, as it makes things even clearer. Plus, not having to rely on syntax all the time allows more flexibility.
Also, no, not everyone knows there is a difference between grammatical gender and actual gender. Otherwise, I wouldn't have written my original comment.
I agree with you about the disorientation when a different language from its own classifies the gender of the nouns differently. I'm italian and the flower is male (il fiore), but in french is female (la fleur), the sea is male in italian (il mare) but female in french (la mer), the afternoon is female in italian (la sera) but male in french (le soir)...
Luke, a beautiful reading of a very funny and witty piece. Mark Twain is a national treasure.
Twain's essay on french fatherhood deserves its own reading.
"And observe the strongest of several German words for explosions--Ausbruch." Always has me rolling my eyes a little. We have the word "Explosion".
You know that this was written in the 19th century when you read that German words are very soft-sounding, and even their cursing is very bland. This obviously was before German language was associated with harsh sounds and extreme violence due to... ehh... uh... certain occurrences.
I think "wegen des Regens" makes a lot of sense, though. In English you say "because of" and in Dutch "vanwege". German uses the genitive instead of "van" or "of". In Dutch you could also say "wegens", which is also sort of a genitive.
The construct "wegen des Noun" or "von Noun wegen" is a Low German construct. Since Dutch and English are closely related to Low German the construct sounds natural to them, BTW, always has also Low German roots. Weg in Low German does not only mean way but also side or location. For High German speakers it sounds very weird. They use wegen with Dative because Weg does only have the meaning of way in their dialects. There are some outdated terms like von Rechts wegen (by law or as of right). In High German you could say von Seiten (Wegen in Low German) des Rechts (literally, from the side of the right). "Von Wegen des Noun" > "wegen des Noun"
Twain really was a wordsmith.
his insite translates after all these years.
insight
Fantastic! Learning German at the moment I completely feel his pain.
Haha I can relate! I love German though. Enjoy and learn well! :)
Musst halt fleissig immer weiterlernen, dann klappt’s auch irgendwann 🤩
Hahahaha you fool did not even discovered the German dialects, only one can be named a master in german if he can handle the major dialects, northerngerman schwäbisch, bayrisch, austrian dialects, and the hardest of them all the eastern tongue! And then you have to master the beautiful singing of the rhein dialects so you will have a masters degree in a capella music theory
I love german, it is such a creative language
@regivos yea we are patient about that because it's entertaining :)
Me too. Although, my mother tongue being Hindi, I can almost always relate with how the article changes with the gender and the case. I still find it difficult to remember the gender of various things, but after a time it comes naturally.
I had this video playing in the background while working. Then, when you got to the "separable verbs" part I started laughing hard. All the memories of learning and trying to speak German came back. It's particularly fun to listen to complex speech and try to keep track of the separable verbs across a long sentence. Lol.
This is my absolute favorite essay of all time and I recommend it at every opportunity. Great to stumble upon it being read aloud. Thanks!
how much laughter was edited out?!? a masterful rendition!
Die Spitze meines Fingers ist wund vom wegdrücken der Werbungsunterbrechungen.
Werbepause, Werbung, Werbeunterbrechung, Werbefilm oder Schrottandreherfilm
I read this 40 years ago and "the unfortunate fir forest" still kills me.
We Dutch people always falsely assume that German is simular to Dutch.
And therefore easy to learn.
That is, until we get lost totally in the dark Teutonic forest of the genders and cases.
We still love you and understand you. Greetings from Cologne. It's funny that dutch and German now days communicate in English. We are to ashamed to speak dutch German mix with each other:D. Like Spanish and Portuguese (portuñol)
@@MegaMayday16 Kann ziemlich gut Deutsch reden und schreiben, doch nicht ganz perfekt. Und dann mach ich es einfach nicht.
hahaha, luke at one point around 10 minutes in, you started reading the end of certain sentences like seinfeld punchlines, really enhanced the experience
Haha thanks, I’m glad you enjoyed that!
I haven't laughed so hard in quite a while. OMG. "The Tale of the Fishwife and Its Sad Fate" is pure comedic genius. He clearly got the German grammar wrong since we have the same gendering in Spanish (except for the neuter). But the actual tale just works so well in English. I am crying here with laughter!
which specific things are gendered in what way does differ between languages. for instance, in german and russian, a key is masculine, while in romance languages it is feminine.
Rest assured, Germans have a good laugh emulating English grammar, too.
"Was tust du wollen zu tun?" - "Ich bin gehend zu essen ein Ding."
You can make any grammar sound silly that way, but it never feels that strange in its native language.
Dank dir für deine Videos und deine Lesungen! Dein Kanal is echt klasse :)
Danke 😃
I think learning a language becomes 10 x easier if you just focus on reproducing what you see and hear without thinking too hard about grammatical rules, once you have a strong feel for the language, go back and study the grammar and it will be so much easier to understand. Just like you did in your mother tongue.
Yes .. but it takes very long time .. kids take years to have fluency in their native tongue .. and they are surrounded by people speaking that native language all the time ..
I agree to a point, but language acquisition is not the same as fluency or even proficiency. Having an idea of how a language works and possessing a paltry vocabulary will make you speak like a child. That might be acceptable for a tourist chatting with the natives, but you can develop terrible habits that could turn out to be quite embarrassing later.
Yes, start speaking. Yes, throw yourself into the deep end, but never dismiss the notion that serious work is required, and should be ventured as soon as possible when learning a new language. The grammar is far more important and vital than a broad vocabulary. No one knows every word in their own language, but they are likely to incorporate a "new" word properly, if they've got the grammar covered.
@@walidaichi2927 Not at all. It does take *some time*, mind you, but I propose you can learn any language within one year to perfect fluency (writing not necessarily included).
It's just that most language teaching is still stuck in the 20th century.
@@macvena Nope, that is not at all what I'd advise.
Start with listening and reading only, learn to speak afterwards, and only when you're semi-fluent start checking principles of grammar.
Of course, your practice partners will have to correct you. Otherwise, you can't learn as you rightly put, but humans learn languages light-years faster inductively than by principle.
This appreciates me having German as my native tongue even MORE!
I think all languages have negative things to complain, my native language is Spanish and I heard a lot of foreigners complaining about how difficult it is to say the verbs conjugations right. On the other hand I study English, German and French and I can tell that German spelling and pronuntiation is more regular than the other two, it looks like Spanish spelling that way.
I agree. Im Greek and many people think that it is a difficult language to learn (for some reason the locals perpetuate this myth) but there are solid grammatical rules and a logic structure. Yes I agree all these can be alot to some people but once you learn the rules then its easy to spell and pronounce words that you never heard before, unlike the chaotic situation with english where you have to memorize alot of pronounciations and constantly ask people how they spell their name.
The worst thing about Spanish is the advanced grammar and the masterful use of the various verb' times+modes and understanding their interaction with each other.
E.g.: Valga lo que valiere, que al buen pagador no le duelen prendas (es un refrán, se hace uso del futuro del subjuntivo y además de aquella cosita llamada 'subjuntivo reduplicativo').
En breve, if one does not know any Romance language to a suficiently high degree... the advanced grammar is a nightmare but I am simultaneously intrigued by all that and can not choose but continue studying it at the expense of my sanity.
@@PewPewPlasmagun "Subjuntivo reduplicativo" sounds like a bullshit term coined by some self-aggrandizing Spanish teacher in his spare time and propagated through the internet. Just the fact that it uses the verb "reduplicar", which I had to look up in a dictionary to see if it was even a real word, makes me instantly suspicious of it. I can guarantee that maybe one in a million native speakers, if that, would know the meaning of it.
The thing I will never learn in Spanish is the pronunciation of "r" versus "rr". The difficulty of the verb system (like in all romance languages) I can manage. But rr...no way.
.
@@rainerm.8168 hey, as it happens, this very channel has a video on that very subject! can't link it cause YT eats links but it's on here, I watched it just recently.
Nice reading, it was my first time hearing/reading this essay, and while I know it's mostly meant as a "friendly jab" at the German language, and Twain has some points, I also can't resist pointing out some flaws that show that he merely had a superficial understanding of the language.
Take the part about "sie/Sie" for example. While it's true that the word can have several meanings in English, it is *always* clear from the surrounding words, that is to say their conjugation and declination, what it means. If it's plural("they" in English) the verb will be in 3rd. person plural form, if it's singular it can either be "you (formal)" or "she", which is also clear from the conjugation of the verb. There are some cases in which "you (singular formal)" and "they", in theory, could be confused, but that should always be clear from context.
Regarding the (grammatical) genders, Twain is right that they are pretty irregular, but mostly they actually do align with the natural gender if they refer to a person/animal (For animals, masculine form is often taken as a "don't know" or indefinite form). The word he talks about, "Mädchen" is an exception because it is a diminutive which is always neuter. And that tomcat in German is feminine is just plain false, there is an extra word for tomcat, "Kater", which is masculine.
There are some more minor "mistakes", but I don't want this to be too long and please don't take my "rant" too serious, I just wanted to maybe clear up some points. Anyway, I still found it to be pretty funny, mostly thanks to your excellent reading of it ^^
"if it's singular it can either be "you (formal)" or "she", which is also clear from the conjugation of the verb"
That is incorrect! The formal "you" has same form as 3rd person plural (they). When written , the formal "you" is capitalized ("Sie), while "they" is not ("sie").
And we didn‘t even talk about „Ihr“ (plural, second person) which is also a formal way of saying „you“ (singular, second person). It‘s much older and was reserved as a pronoun for the aristocracy.
It's funny, cause most native English speakers have no issue with understanding their own pronoun system but it's in some ways more bizarre than the German one.
For instance; 'you' is both singular and plural 2nd person. 'you' to a group and 'you' to a person are indistinguishable, and, what's more, even in singular use, 'you' takes 'are', which is a plural form of 'to be'.
then: the oddity that is 'they'. yes, it's most well known to be a 3rd person plural. But (and I refuse to get into any arguments here- such usage is attested as far back as 1325) it can also be used as a 3rd person singular, in 2 cases; one, when what is being addressed is animate but neuter, and two, when what is being addressed is animate but of *unknown or unspecified* gender, which is a different thing than neuter and rather unique.
then, it can also be used in a general sense, in idioms. for instance, in a phrase beginning with 'They say...', 'they' is not referring to anyone in particular; rather, it means the same as 'It is said...'
That was hysterically funny! Twain was like a masterful stand-up comedian of the 19th Century who roasted like a boss!
I love it. He's (almost) totally right. But to a native speaker these complaints of his are almost never an issue. I guess this shows how importent it is to immers yourself into a language if you want to learn it. Trying to construct senteces based on arbitrary grammatical rules seems like wasted brain-power. I learned to speak english fluently with almost perfect pronunciation, but when my teachers asked me how I constructed my sentence, I could not give them an answer because I simply didn't know how I did it. I didn't know because I didn't have to know.
On has to learn grammar,in order to forget it (constructively)
Having found you through your Life of Brian video, I was expecting this to be a "Mark Twain butchers German in a story" and got "Mark Twain eviscerates German in a story" and am here for it!
I just had a discussion about a German compound word that includes "zug". The term "Zugfuhererwagen" which roughly transliterates into "train leader car" but in context was about a variant of Sturmgeshutz, so it means "command tank"
just one point of correction, it should be '-fuehrer-', as 'ue' is how one transmits the u-umlaut without a proper keyboard. there's no extra vowel between the h and r.
@@comradewindowsill4253 thanks for that. I should have known that since I describe the umlaut as "slur the vowel with 'E'" to friends, pointing out how it can change the meaning of a word completely.
Such an acute, if highly judgmental, observer Mark Twain was! ^^
A note on pronounciation, the German 'ü' (as in 'gehüllten') is like saying a long 'i', while forming the lips to say 'u'. The tongue does 'i', lips do 'u'. That's what I always tell my voice students. Conversely, the 'ö' is the tongue doing a closed 'e' while the lips form 'o'.
Funnily enough, your diphtong 'eu' is quite perfect, that is pronounced in German as 'oü'.
Your 'ä' is of course on point because it's nothing different than the open Latin 'Ɛ'.
Fun fact: Das Mädchen - the girl is a diminutive form and those are always neuter.
It is derived from die Maid - the maiden, which actually is female. So Mädchen literally means small/cute maiden.
Now don't get me wrong the grammatical gender system is pretty awful,
but in this specific case it is consistent. Btw I see the somewhat ironic and humorous aspect of my comment in regard of Twains amusing "rant".
"Door" is feminine in German, "car" is masculine, and "girl" (Mädchen) is neuter. German noun gender is grammatical and not biological, like in English. It's not intuitive for non-German speakers. And since German is more reflexive than English, noun gender is important in making the rest of the language work. If you get the noun gender wrong, many more mistakes will follow. As an example, "the" is always "the" in English; in German "the" could be 6 different things, used under 16 different grammatical conditions, all dependent on the gender of the noun.
@@Tflexxx02 Well, the total of 16 would be depending on gender+case+number, to be precise 😉
@@AndersGehtsdochauch And as a German and as is the case with your language, you and it are "precise"...and correct. Vielen Dank!
@@Tflexxx02 Genau! Das war der Witz. Und du hast es erkannt 🥰😍😊😉👍
Nah, the grammatical gender is fine. Do not let Twain convince you otherwise!
The forms of the word 'jedan" (one) in serbian language:
- "Jedan" (as in number "one" - also masculine as in "one man")
- "Jedna" (feminine as in "one woman")
-"Jedno" (neuter as in "one child")
-"Jedni" (a kind of masculine plural of something in common - like members of one group)
-"jedne" (as above but feminine plural)
-"jednom" (masculine grammatical case - as in "to one man" also neuter "to one child")
-"jednoj" (as above but feminine - "to one woman")
-"jednog" (masculine grammatical case - as in "I saw one man")
-"jednu" (feminine grammatical case - as in "I saw one woman")
-"jednima" (grammatical case of "jedni")
-"jednome" (variation of "jednom")
-"jednom" (different meaning then above - as in "once upon a time")
I am not sure that this is all.
Один
Одна
Одно
Одни
(In Russian there is no female form of "one")
(К) Одному
(К) Одной
Одного
Одну
Одними
Одним
(С) Одном
and so on.
It was so cool to see this.
Makes absolutely perfect sense to me :)
Excellent reading of a great essay. I know which language I may well continue avoiding ;)
Hahaha it's not all bad.
As a German, I laughed my ass off in some places.
I’m a Physics college graduate and German grammar is the most logical system I’ve encountered in any language I’ve learned. This is hilarious, though, but only because Twain is such a brilliant writer and humorist. ✌🏽
Some observations by a native English-speaker, who once lived in East and West Germany:
--Luke of this website, who loves grammatically complicated, reflexive Latin, should also enjoy grammatically complicated, reflexive Germanic German.
--Twain's view of German: "Slipshod and systemless". That description is the opposite of German, the latter having more grammatical rules and regulations than you can shake a stick at.
--With German word order in subordinate clauses, I sometimes scan to the end of the clause to the verb to find out what is actually happening.
--"Separable verbs": Even English-speakers get used to them.
--"Sie/sie": Their use is all in their context.
--The "e" added to "Haus", "Pferd", or "Hund" in the dative case has, to some extent, fallen out of use in contemporary German.
--"In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has". A turnip in German grammar has far more femininity than a young lady.
--",,,one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book" for German grammar: One could say the same for English spelling.
--"Engländerinn" is "Engländerin" today...only one final "n".
--"vermiethen" (to rent) is "vermieten" today...no "h". Also, "Neanderthal" in English represents a 19th Century German spelling; today it's "Neandertal" in German ("Neander Valley"). There was no need for the "h" in the pronunciation, so the Germans just dropped it. If only the English would keep up with English spelling like the Germans!
--"Tal" (valley) in German is where we get "dollar". A coin of the realm for the Habsburg monarchy was the "Thaler", as it was spelled up the 20th Century. "Dollar" comes from "Taler".
--English has a larger vocabulary than German, because the former is an amalgam of Germanic Anglo-Saxon and Romance French/Latin, along with Old Nordic Danish.
--Long German compound nouns are easier to understand than many English words, the latter relying on a knowledge of Latin akin to Cicero's to understand them.
--Twain: "I have devoted upward of 9 full weeks...to a careful and critical study of this tongue..." The attitude of an American tourist...with a sense of humor.
lol realize this essay is 100% satirical and not to be taken seriously, right? 😂
@@polyMATHY_Luke Yes, of course, Luke. I don't have much opportunity to speak German, anymore, so I ran a bit off at the mouth here over the language.
But note also that in the body of classical German literature (Goethe, Schiller, etc.), there are no comedies. In comparison, Shakespeare wrote at least 10 or 12. The phrase, "a German sense of humor" (ein deutscher Sinn für Humor"), is in itself....kind of funny. A little like Twain.
(I enjoy listening to you, Luke. Continued good luck with your websites. Your voice in Latin is mesmerizing, though I understand no Latin.) Dave.
In 1873 the ,th' was mostly replaced with a ,t' , only a few words kept it until 1901. Thron ( throne) is the last german word with a ,th' , with the exeption of words of non german origin. When the story is true, Wilhelm ll saved the ,Th' in throne.
@@Tflexxx02 A few notes from a native speaker of German:
If you'd ever seen a modern young girl from Germany you'd fully understand why a turnip has more femininity!
BTW: It is also quite true that the most pronounced growth in young German boys is the letter "B" - they are born as Engel (angel), but very soon turn into Bengel (rude boy)!
You are quite right about the rules of German grammar - there are a lot of rules to this language. In fact we love the rules so much that there are at least ten to every little grammatical construct!
Please don't reduce German literature to Goethe and Schiller, while they are the most well known "Dichter und Denker" - they are by no means the only ones. It is also not true that there are no comedies - we take humor quite serious! There are classics like "Till Eulenspiegel" or "Die Schildbürger" - they may not be written by well known names, but they are none the less quite important, our folk tales are full of humor. There are also a couple of "Lustspiele" by Goethe and Schiller if you insist on those two. If you study Mozart's music a bit closer - you'll discover that this family (yes, there's more than one) had a life away from the Opera House in which they composed music of an even less serious nature than, say, the Magic Flute. For much of German history (15th-18th century) you'll have trouble finding comedy if you look at the big literary names only, because it was regarded as "not high art" and "for simple people only", but you will find rather important and influential works if you broaden your view. You will also find quite a bit of humor hidden in otherwise serious works - as I said: we take humor very serious. In more modern times you'll be able to find the likes of Heinz Ehrhardt or Loriot for your amusement in an otherwise stressful language...
It may not be a coincidence that during much of the 19th and 20th century German iron works were highly regarded for their quality - after all the skillful mastery of irony is an important cultural value here!
@@Tflexxx02 You have to turn to Austria for comedies from this period. Read Nestroy.
I finally get now why my German has severely suffered after me living abroad for so long and why I hate hearing myself talk when visiting family and friends. I realized that when I communicate with English speakers, my English sentences are usually short and generic because that's how most people talk (which does not say anything about anybody's IQ, it's just how modern English works). Unintentionally, I applied this to my German and it lost every fascinating edge and complexity that makes it beautiful and poetic to a German speaker's ear. Now I sound like a 10 year old messaging on whatsapp.
42:21 That is not how the German language developed afterwards. In colloquial German it is the Genitive which is on the decline, often replaced by the Dative: Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod.
Oh boy, Mark Twain was such a witty character, he reckoned it would take him 30 years to learn German, as an adult; not so as a child though !!
I would have loved to read what Mark Twain would have written if he’d been learning Turkish. He would have had a field day with “muvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştiremeyeceklerimizdenmişsinizcesine”, or a quite normal sentence like, “His-mother Istanbul-to having-gone man-from five Liras I-took.” ;-)
English has a few whoppers, antidisestablishmentarianism, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, floccinaucinihilipilification, pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism, psychophysicotherapeutics, and otorhinolaryngological - all of which are made from Latin/Greek words
@@billps34 Yes that’s a compound and we and esp the Germans can do that well. But the Turkish one is actually a whole sentence. :-)
Oh my gosh, that's so hilarious 🤣🤣🤣 I have to pause the vid (just 4:13) because my cheeks and jaw are hurting from laughter 😂 after a short break for massage the pain out of my face, I'm totally ready for the German Pain 😂😂😂😂 So genial zu hören, wie es sich für Nicht - Muttersprachler anfühlt 😅 *Lachtränen wegwisch*
Awww I’m glad you like Twain! He’s so funny. I like that German was correctly thought of as being a very sweet sounding language, which it is.
@@polyMATHY_Luke Oh yes, he is! And you did an outstanding job intonating his thoughts!! 😍😂👏
This is interesting 😂
I got my B1 Certificate in 6 months.... I really love the language. I love languages in general. Working towards B2.
6 month for b1, freacking hell.
@@TheZenytram yup!! It was quite easy..... I had the interest and I wasn't doing anything else at the time😂.....Did A1 + A2 in 3 months....then B1 in the next 3....did my exam and ☑️
What a witty and fantastic combination, Mark Twain and your speech.. Eine spielerische wörterbedingungszugänglichausgearbeitete Aussage ?
Avec Schubert pour clore l'essai en beauté !
😨
At 42:30 when you read "except he discover it by accident". You read "discovers" which is incorrect. It should be "discover" as written, which is deliberately written in the subjunctive. Just saying!!! LOL
lol whoops!
Just imagine Mark Twain tried Russian (or perhaps, any Slavic language except Bulgarian).
He was a very clever guy. So he didn't. He preferred to recover after what German did to him. Russian or Polish etc. would have seriously endangered that.
@@rainerm.8168 man, Polish is a trip. take the common name ending "-sław", and tell me which consonant is pronounced 'w'... it's sure not the one you'd think of first!
There is actually no "wegen den Regen" (at least not to my knowledge). But in current German we often use the Dativ with "wegen", which is wrong, but repeated so often it is almost right.
The rule is: "wegen+Genitv".
The only exception is: "wegen dem Regen" i.e. "wegen+Dativ".
The rule will probably be changed sometime because it is outdated. :/
That is because the German genitive has more or less become a "possisive" rather then the original meaning, which has been overtaken by compound-words or is shifting to prepositions (that might demand other cases): Most often "von dem/vom".
Just like in Italian with "di" or English with "of".
Even Latin -in which the genitive could be used possessive "property" was mostly expressed with Dative constructions ("mihi est 'noun-in-dative' " e.g.)
-Whereas in Russian the Genitive can never be used possessive ..! interestingly🙂😎.
I as a native-speaker also "feel" the Genitive more to be a Possessive and it even sound more right to use wegen +Dative , today...
@@juavi6987 Das mag alles stimmen - aber wegen der jahrelangen Hartnäckigkeit meiner Lehrer bevorzuge ich den Genitiv. ;)
@@elkes.6859 Never heard of "wegen dem Regen" being correct. Really strange. Who came up with that?
@@epajarjestys9981 High German dialects do not know preposition with Genitive. Therefore, they use wegen + Dative. BTW, thanks to the Prussian office language we have the weird wegen + Genitive as standard. Its a Low German thing that sounded cool and modern to officers. The preposition trotz shared the same fate: overrun by the Genitive driven by snobbish coolnes. You can still see the old dative in terms like trotz allem or trotzdem.
i just realised that english language (not my native) in the 19th century was the same as it is today whereas my native language (polish) was so different even in the 20th century to the point it is not valid anymore to speak or type the way people did less than 100 years ago
Prawda?! Wow.
Polish pronunciation went through really little change. We had a spelling reform between the wars, that's it. Compare the differences between 400 y/o Polish and modern one and the oned to be found between 400y/o French and moder one. In case of Polish, pronunciation will be really similar and most words stay with their meaning and there are little archaic forms in high literature, but the spelling is a bit odd, in French you'll see that the pronunciation is completely different, the grammar nowadays shifts towards compound forms and there are lots of unused words, but the spelling stays almost the same. L'Académie Française did really tiny reforms, Polish ones were bigger (y no longer a consonant, joint spelling of words) with less sound changes in the meanwhile
@@orjhyu3v2ehv3h You actually had a SPELLING reform (relatively) recently? And your language looks like THAT?! Wow! I thought it was a bad case of historical orthography, seems I was wrong. It's unnecessarily complicated. All those consonant clusters could be done away with. Your reformers did a reaaaally bad job, you need another reform.
@@volimNestea It was a small reform, mostly unifying rules and so on. In Polish it just was done the way that the letter 'z' just kinda works as a "diacritic" for the precedent letter, same goes for 'i' often. Actually we just have too many consonant phonemes. We could solve the problem of notating /ʃ/ (often seen analised as /ʂ/) and /ɕ/ by using different diacritics, but we historically stuck to digraphs 'sz' and 'si'(ś). Polish uses lots of digraphes, but it's almost always consistent. Reading in the language has extremely few exceptions, writing is a bit more tricky, because we have many rules for devoicing and voicing, but also palatalisation. Don't get me wrong, because of historical spelling writing in Polish is a pain, but once you learn the rules, which are pretty much always followed, you appreciate it, because, same as in e. g. French, it makes seeing the conections between words very easy. If Polish got a true spelling reform, one letter per phoneme and vice versa, it'd be a pain to understand its written form by other Slavic languages. Nowadays, Polish is easy to read, but difficult enough to write, but it is NOT the reason why it looks so scary. The reason is using digraphs and diacritics at once which is a choice and a consistent feature of our orthography. If Polish were written in cyrillic, whithout real spelling reforms, you could easily see it's not that bad. The only modern instances of troublesome spelling is 'ż' and 'rz', 'u' and 'ó', in many varieties (not mine) also 'ch' and 'h'. That's it (and it still helps with declensions and understanding other Slavic langs). Smaller problems are the ones with voicing, mostly resolved by learning a few simple rules. E. g. Przekład /'pʃɛkwat/
'rz' is a digraph causing confusion with ż, usually representing /ʒ/, devoiced after voiceless stops preserves its "voiced writing"
D as a voiced plosives (same goes for fricatives) gets devoiced at the end of the word.
Accurate spelling: Pszekłat
Does it look any less messy? I don't think so. We have quite a normal amount of historical spelling with very little exceptions.
French on the other hand notorically "omits" maaany sounds and has lots of digraphes that are completely unpredictable. When hearing [ɛ] you cannot possibly guess if it's written 'ai', 'aie', 'è', 'ê' or just 'e' before a double (only on writing, not actually geminated in speech) consonant or maybe an 'ë' after a vowel.
In Polish you hear [ɕ], you know to write it 'si' before a vowel, 'ś' at the end of the word or before a consonant, sometimes 'ź' can act as 'ś' and that's the only confusion that Polish has to offer.
@@volimNestea Actually we don't have consonant clusters that could be reduced, they're important for the word's meaning and it's mostly digraphs causing confusion. Try learning Slovak or Czech, if you prefer diactricts, but want to get the consonant cluster feel
Obviously, Twain has never studied Japanese. His complaints would fit there much better.
The only problem with the japanese is their writing system (three alphabets and kanji system). If they can reform it (they have been trying since from 1890s, but always getting blocked) it will be OK. If they don't, just like Mark Twain sad, it will take it's place in dead languages.
The difficulties of Japanese are, imo, not limited to the wiriting system, which is actually quite simple in my opinion with the exception of the thousands of Kanji... I learned japanese and understand why it's classified as one of the hardest languages to study. i managed the 2 alphabets "Hiragana" and "Katakana" within a few weeks many years ago, it was simple (because it's just a limited number of letters) and fun and i never forgot them (although i never speak japanese); I also learned hundreds to a thousand or more of kanji within a few years, but unlike the alphabets, i gradually forget the less important ones. Kanji and their various pronuciations are indeed the hardest things about japanese, it takes a lot of time. I think Japanese is difficult for speakers of indo-european languages because it's an agglutinative language with really hard grammar, besides it has many peculiarities such as honorifics and different polite forms (kenjogo and sonkeigo, Ive already forgotten them completely) and in general, different levels of language and registers, more than in indoeuropean languages. Being either an isolated language or part of the suggested altaic language group, it's got nearly no common traits with indo-european languages; actually, almost everything is hard about Japanese because the way of saying things is different, it is a language where most of the information that IE language speakers must say can or must be omitted and has to be taken from the context (i forgot the linguistic term for that,example: "I love you". is "Aishiteru", but it actually only means "to love" in the progressive form, neither the speaker nor the receiver is mentioned in the sentence; the same applies to "dai suki", another more common way of saying i love or like you, which is just "to like/love", personal pronouns and objects are usually not said in normal speech if they are evident from the context); another hard thing about Japanese: homophones, many homonyms and even homopraphs. The only easy thing is the simple and clear pronunciation and thousands of Anglicisms, probably more than in any other language. Japanese can't be compared to German concering its difficulty level.
@@Paul-vk7bx Agree. I experience it daily. My family is half Japanese half German.
@@ghlscitel6714 Now *that* is a family get-together I would love to listen in on! The hardest part of Japanese for me isn't learning individual kanji, but trying to piece together some understanding of kanji compound words. Especially anything government-related seems to have adopted the Germanic practice of agglutination, to the extent of utter incomprehensiblity just knowing the individual kanji. In my humble, 12-year-long attempt, beginning in my 50's, at studying.
@@maverikmiller6746 Obviously, you know as much about Japanese as I know about Sumerian.
Amazing how you managed to wrap your tongue around the compound words and the somewhat archaic German spelling used back in Twain's days.
Of course, Twain does get a few things wrong or does so deliberately, but I love his snark and the way he embeds it into this truly enjoyable essay.
Well read, I enjoyed it! 👍🏻
Danke sehr! :D Thanks very much!
In German formulating sentences is an art form. Because the cases and genders are so complicated a sentence can be extremely long and still precisely describe what it is supposed to describe. Also compound words, while daunting for learners of German, they give you the ability to create new words that can be very complex and still make intuitively sense to Germans pretty easily. I was shocked when i learned that long sentences are considered bad writing in English, in German the longer and more complex the sentence (without being incomrpehensible of course), the better it is.
Another fun fact: In germany it is considered extremely rude to interrupt someones speaking, the reason for that is that you simply wouldn't know what the person was saying if you wont let him finish the sentence. In most other languages you know it halfway thorugh.
@Tomáš Laštovička Der, die and das are just the standard nominative articles. There are some more of them (des, dessen, dem, den, deren, derer, ein, einer, einem, eines, etc.) and the declination of the nouns themselves is quite irregular. Of course there are more complicated declination systems, but it isn‘t that simple, either.
I was listening to Winterreise before watching this video. I felt surprised when Frülingstraum, the 11th lied, played at the end
Wonderful of you to note that! Thanks for watching
"whenever the literary german dives into a sentence, this is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his atlantic with his verb in his mouth" is probably going to end up being my senior quote
19:20 to be fair English has the unfair advantage of including the gender in the word itself. Twains "the she-Englishwoman" would properly translate to "Die sie Engländerinn", which is wrong so if we said "Die Engländerfrau" like the English do this problem wouldn't occur. :D
@ 6:30
If having a verb at the end is such a pain in the ass to him, I'm sure he'd appreciate many ancient Near Eastern Semitic languages, which overwhelmingly put the verb first in the sentence (unless it's Akkadian, in which case he'd hate its guts).
@ 27:45
And platoon. It led one unfortunate guy to mistranslate "platoon leader" to "train conductor" in some old books on Stalingrad.
Oh, Samuel, you know we were made to suffer... let us enjoy it! Lol
Great stuff. I would've loved to hear old Sam Clemens describe the rules of lenition/fortition present in Irish or just how important tone is in Mandarin, in which it appears that it is theoretically easy to accidentally say "I rode your mother last night", instead of "I rode your horse last night", if your tone isn't correct (Ma, 妈 and 马, respectively).
I laughed my ass OFF. :D This piece was utterly hilarious. Thank you!
I even imagine this being read by Mr. Rowan Atkinson... What a marvel.
I'm sure that he admired the German language. How else could he have complained about it with so much love, care and passion?
I find it funny how mr Twain makes fun of verb stacking in German with the ridiculous seven word verb stack "haben sind gewesen gehabt haben geworden sein". But as a matter of fact, the Dutch language, unlike German (which never has more than four infinitives after another), does actually allow seven word long verb stacks. Case in point: "Ik zou jou weleens hebben willen zien durven blijven staan kijken." This is a perfectly grammatical and meaningful sentence in Dutch, meaning something along the lines of: "I would have liked to see you dare to remain standing and looking sometime."
First I was in going to proclaim in a sing-song voice, like gleeful children, that someone was salty. Only when he wrote about his reforms of German, I noticed that some of this was happening, or has at some point in time occurred, which can only mean, that German is alive and well, changing even now at this very moment.
Yet, as I listened and pondered upon his words, he went back to making his displeasure known, going right back to being salty, something I found to be highly amusing!
Salve Lucius - I'm a journalist from ... Heidelberg ahahaha, and Luke, your German pronunciation is excellent. Not sure, however, whether your fine accent results from English or Italian influence. I love Mark Twain's texts and thank you for reading this to us. By the way: overlong sentences with split verbs (called "Schachtelsätze") are bad style in writing and will be redacted by editors of newspapers promptly xD
Grüße Dich, Luke - Ich bin Journalistin aus Heidelberg (...), und Luke, Deine deutsche Aussprache ist exzellent; bin aber nicht sicher, ob Dein feiner Akzent ein Resultat englischen oder italienischen Einflusses ist. Ich liebe Mark Twains Texte, Danke fürs Vorlesen. Übrigens: überlange Sätze mit aufgeteilten Verben (genannt "Schachtelsätze"), gehören zum schlechten Schreibstil und werden von Zeitungsredakteuren umgehend redigiert xD
Depends who writes the Schachtelsätze. Bad on a paper. Brilliant if written by Thomas Mann or Heinrich von Kleist.
As some who has started learning German since the age of 6-7 (now I'm 32) I have to say that Mark Twain is a genius and was able to very accurately describe this pile of spaghetti called German language. That said you have various tricks and rules that help you out remember various linguistic features of this language. But then again why complicate something and then create rules to simplify it... LOL
I think I need to clarify something here: the rules are NOT there to simplify learning German. They are there to confuse and confound the student! ;-)
Yes, that includes German native students. I though I was able to speak my language and that I spoke it well until I learned about "Grammatik"... a word that sends shivers down the spines of generations of students.
@@KonradTheWizzard Start it all with Latin. Then you'll appreciate grammar. Grammar as a method to understand the relations between various parts of a phrase can be absolutely fascinating.
Mark Twain sure really loved the German language. You could also write such a long text about it, if your hate was as strong as love, but you could never show how much of your soul was invested into the language, like he did. And of course, he really understood, that German was intended for song and poetry, but never for everyday live or work.The evolution of the language inside a pool of thousands of different regional dialects was shaped by heroic epics, love songs or venting out all your Weltschmerz, when your beloved one doesn't notice you.Our children learned it from fantastic fairytales. For business, politics and science, we used Latin (and later French). 😉
Haha
Thank you, thank you, thank you for posting this video!
Bisher habe ich mehrere deiner Videos zum Thema Latein gesehen und hatte die ganze Zeit keinerlei Ahnung dass Deutsch deine erste Fremdsprache war. 😅
Liebe Grüsse aus 🇮🇩 !
Polymathy, I’m not sure if this is a legitimate question, but I would love a video on ‘The most linguistically elegant language’. Like the one with the least confusion exemplified here, and with an elegant structure and even logical etymology. Is there such thing as ‘the most beautifully structured language?’
Mandarin Chinese uses the least amount of words on average, which might fit your description
As a German I read KANT with great pleasure.
I´m very much aware of the complicated writing style of Kant giving always tremendous difficulties for non speaking German readers of Kant to understand the complicated text. I heard that ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS of Kant were TRANSLATED BACK INTO GERMAN for having an immediate understanding of the famous German philosopher.
I was reminded of reading Kant by your excellent mentioning of TWAIN on German language - thank you so much!
PS: One hundred years ago German was the main language in science - many learned German in order to read & understand GERMAN TEXTS. DOCTORAL THESES were mainly written in GERMAN. GERMAN SCIENCE WAS LEADING IN THE WORLD, INCLUDING LATIN & GREEK.
After ww 2 we experienced a great decline in estimating German culture & language - thanks to the famous FRANKFURT SCHOOL and the so called SIXTY EIGHT MOVEMENT having left their traces til today.
Anyway, much thanks & greetings from Germany!
> translated back into German
That's really funny. Do you have a source for that?
@@jacobscrackers98, try this:
philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/22237/should-i-learn-german-to-read-kants-critique-of-pure-reason-in-german
and
www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/250der/is_or_was_there_a_translation_issue_with_reading/
I find Kant to be quite clear. He has a very precise language which makes his constructions necessarily complex. But in return, there’s almost no ambiguity.
I have a lot more trouble with say Heidegger. He basically constructed his own language which is built using German building blocks, but which comes with its own meanings, generating a lot of confusion.
My favourite philosopher is of course Nietzsche. He is the opposite of Kant in terms of language. His language is clear and simple in terms of construction. It’s powerfully eloquent and a joy to read unlike the laborious task of reading Kant. But in return, it leaves the mental work for the reader. It’s not clear at all what he’s trying to transport which is why there are so many different interpretations of Nietzsche.
Why are you SHOUTING at US?
@@comradewindowsill4253, sorry for that, but I only wanted to EMPHASIZE what I considered important. No harm meant.
As a native German, I have great difficulty following the "English translations", like at 20:34. The pronouns sound so wrong and confusing in this context that I lose track of them all the time. Of course they make perfect sense in German.
Wait do how do you know in German what is referring to what?
@@DrTheRich Context, and by elimination.
But, as a native speaker, you may not fully appreciate the mental gymnastics that your brain performs in the background. It only becomes apparent (for me, at least) in cases like this, where the translation into English kind of removes that effortless part of it, leaving me confused.
Take, for example, the sentence "It opened its Mouth to cry for Help; but if any Sound comes out of him, alas he is drowned by the raging of the storm." The first "It" must refer to something neuter that came before. It could refer to "Eye", but that makes no sense (an eye has no mouth). So it refers to the Fishwife. Same for "its". "Him" must refer to something masculine. The only option is "Mouth". The "he" after "alas" is another instance where context is necessary, as it could refer to either "Mouth" or "Sound" (it can't refer to the Fishwife, which is neuter). Drowning a sound just makes more sense, and indeed is the correct option here.
Mark Twain is lucky to have never learned Korean (or any strictly head-final language, for that matter). He would've had a heart attack.
6:11 oh you did it so perfectly 🤣 and it's so true: many of my fellow Germans, for no reason at all (?) add a "gewesen" where it doesn't belong... it drives me crazy every time 🤪
Ist doch normal, kommt ja immer darauf an von wo man kommt teilweise sprechen zwei Nachbardörfer ein anderes deutsch und fügen Wörter ein welche sonst nicht dahin gehören oder wie es in meiner Heimat ist an das Ende einer jeder Aussage ein bestätigendes "gell"
@@tauvid9798 Ja, das "gell" kenne ich auch...
Nur setzt man damit halt nicht unabsichtlich das Verb ins Plusquamperfekt 😁
Und es ist auch kein regionales Phänomen wie das gell, sondern eher sprecherabhängig.
In Berlin üblich - das Berliner Plusquamperfekt. Wo ein Nicht-Berliner sagen würde "Ich war im Kino" sagt der Berliner Einheimische "Ich war im Kino gewesen." Det is janz normal hier.
I once started reading a translation o f the German novel Parzifal. Simple and straightforward are things that the writing does not seldom fail to be.
Well, I studied German after studying English. And I'm also a native Russian speaker. So it was a walk in the park:
- What, only FOUR cases?
- Wait, only genitive case is really tricky?
- Wait, there are no verb aspects and the tense system is basically the same as in English?
- Almost fully phonetic writing system? LUXURY!
- You don't even have to think about capitalization! Because each Noun starts with a Capital Letter.
The way Mark Twain describes the German language reminds me of my fencing lessons. Attack, feint, feint, feint, (feint, feint, feint, feint,) feint, feint, lunge and land a hit, or a variation of that theme.
Confuse, obfuscate, misdirect, distract, deceive, and get that hit in.
You shall write "Regen", but you want to say "Reg'n" - The vocal has to be muted! An old german saying: "Vom Regen in die Traufe"
This is exactly how I feel with German right now
Haha. You can do it! Keep up the hard work. I love German, and it's worth it to study ti. Viel Glück!
And these are Twain's impressions after studying a GERMANIC language. I wonder what he'd make of studying a non-Indo-European language!
😁 maybe he should have tried Hungarian. They have separatable verbs too - but the system is even less understandable than the German one...
Plus, you can hardly connect any word to any language you ever heard before. But - nevertheless it's so beautiful 💜
Hungarian doesn't have grammatical genders. The complications of Hungarian stem from conjugation. But lack of grammatical genders make Hungarian easier to understand than German.
@@josephpendleton4927 ...actually you don't need to understand grammatical gender to understand German. As the assignment is pretty arbitrary it is just a kind of pass code to identify you as German native speaker or foreigner. You will understand German sentences without knowing the correct gender for most nouns, and you will simply sound a bit funny when you speak, but people will understand you.
@@KonradTheWizzard Looks like you don't know much about German.
@@josephpendleton4927 Obviously. I'm only a native speaker of German who works closely with quite a few non-native speakers on a daily basis. The assumption that I know anything about my own language is quite ridiculous. I just made this whole post up, it is definitely not based on any kind of experience. I'm so glad you caught me! :-P
Oh the irony and absurdity of an English speaker criticizing and whining about any other language. 😏
It's a joke. Twain loved German.
How hilarious it would have been if Mark Twain had written about the Thai language.
Scratch a Thai name and you will only find Sanskrtm...
26:00 actually a lot of these words associated with Schlag have specific add-ons(im not going to try to remember the correct term for that), for example, there is "Holzschlag"(wood-cutting) or Kahlschlag(approximately Forest-clearing) [or "Schlaganfall" (stroke) or "Faustschlag" (i gotta admit, nobody says that) or "Elektrischer Schlag" etc.].
Although in a closed context( for example to wood-workers talking about cutting wood) the words "Schlag" would probably be enough, so i guess he has a point, but then again, in general, that's not how you'd encounter the word "Schlag" (as in: no one will, in a casual conversation, use the word Schlag out of context).
I would agree that Zug is a better example.
At least that's my perception as a Native
Man muss an der Stelle ja auch beachten, dass Twain zum Zeitpunkt des Entstehens dieses Essays wohl kaum jemals Umgang mit Muttersprachlern hatte und weiterhin das Deutsch des 19. Jahrhunderts noch wesentlich mehr Vokabeln enthielt, die man heutzutage wohl veraltet, ländlich oder fachsprachlich nennen würde. Die zahlreichen Bedeutungen des Wortes „Schlag“, auch ohne Anhänge und Kontext, sind also durchaus nicht alle passend, aber meistenteils durchaus einigermaßen korrekt.
lmfao as a student of German, I love this. And I actually LIKE German, too. But, and I say this with the most affection possible, it is possibly one of the most maddening subjects I study. When I first saw the full extent of German articles, which properly are declined by number or gender, as well as case, I spared a moment's thanks for the fact that Russian was not my only tongue, because I cannot imagine a worse introduction to the concept of articles in general than the German language.
German genders: Die Hose (the trousers), der Rock (the dress - woman's dress, that is), das Mädchen (young girl).
@15:00 "Dat der dative dog done did dat!"
It's funny to hear him complain about the declination of adjectives according to 4 cases and singular/plural. He is right, it's almost as bad as Latin with its extra case... because Twain completely missed that there is also another criterion, which I'm not even sure how to call... definiteness, maybe? Ein guteR Freund, a good friend. Der gute_ Freund, the good friend. Same case and number, different endings. Although at a quick glance, it only seems to make a difference for nominative/singular/male, nominative/singular/neuter and accusative/singular/neuter.
So, German isn't as easy as Twain thought.
wait a minute... this sneaky son of a bitch has been teaching me german this whole time
29:39 Pure gold! 🤣🤣🤣
Thank you, I find that Twain's analogies are funny and well put
I'll never get over how, in German, the verb is often at the end. Edit: I've seen the rest of the video. I had no idea German was so complicated!! smh
This is why I decided on Dutch, instead.
And well you decided. But aren't you troubled by the pronunciation?
Now I know why Bulgarian is so different then other Slavic languages. It copied it's weirdness from German :D
Wow, that was the funniest thing I've ever seen, and heard, about German. Damn. :)
Thanks. Was fun.