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The Awful German Language (1880)

(faculty.georgetown.edu)
198 points nalinidash | 1 comments | 16 May 25 04:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.2s | source
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ccppurcell ◴[16 May 25 08:23 UTC] No.44002994[source]▶
As someone who studied German at school and has made serious attempts to learn Finnish and Czech, I have feelings about this. Obviously Twain was being humourous. But I took three years of German two decades ago, and to this day it is easier than Czech (I'm embarrassed to say, as I've lived here and tried to learn on and off for the last six years). I'm exaggerating only a bit.
replies(2): >>44003204 #>>44019711 #
1. int_19h ◴[18 May 25 07:49 UTC] No.44019711[source]▶
Writing as a native Slavic language speaker, that's fair, but it's mostly a testament to how complex all Slavic languages are. It's like we decided to make it absolutely sure that any foreigner who decided to learn them would be in a world of pain. Declensions? Check. Grammatical gender? Sure, and adjectives and verbs also have it for good measure, not just nouns; and for verbs, it also interacts with tense and number.

And let's not forget about our phonology, with 5-consonant clusters, palatalized labials, utterly unpredictable stress, complex mutations of both consonants and vowels when adding suffixes etc.

By the way, the nearly universal ethnic designation for Germans in Slavic languages - some variation of "nemci" - literally means "mutes".