The Awful German Language (by Mark Twain)

# 1. (In : A Tramp Abroad, "That Awful German Language")

 

My philological studies have satisfied me that a gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years. It seems manifest, then, that the latter tongue ought to be trimmed down and repaired. If it is to remain as it is, it ought to be gently and reverently set aside among the dead languages, for only the dead have time to learn it.

 

# 2. (In : Mark Twain's Notebook)

 

- I don't believe there is anything in the whole earth that you can't learn in Berlin except the German language.

 

- In early times some sufferer had to sit up with a toothache, and he put in the time inventing the German language.

 

- Never knew before what eternity was made for. It is to give some of us a chance to learn German.

 

# 3. (In : Taming the Bicycle)

 

It is not like studying German, where you mull along, in a groping, uncertain way, for thirty years; and at last, just as you think you've got it, they spring the subjunctive on you, and there you are. No- and I see now plainly enough, that the great pity about the German language is, that you can't fall off it and hurt yourself. There is nothing like that feature to make you attend strictly to business.

 

# 4. (In : A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court)

 

Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that 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.

 

# 5. (In : Mark Twain, a Biography)

 

By reading keep in a state of excited ignorance, like a blind man in a house afire; flounder around, immensely but unintelligently interested; don't know how I got in and can't find the way out, but I'm having a booming time all to myself.

Don't know what a Schelgesetzentwurf is, but I keep as excited over it and as worried about it as if it were my own child. I simply live on the Sch.; it is my daily bread. I wouldn't have the question settled for anything in the world.