'There are ten parts of speech, and they are all troublesome. An average sentence, in a German newspaper, is a sublime and impressive curiosity; it occupies a quarter of a column; it contains all the ten parts of speech -- not in regular order, but mixed; it is built mainly of compound words constructed by the writer on the spot, and not to be found in any dictionary -- six or seven words compacted into one, without joint or seam -- that is, without hyphens; it treats of fourteen or fifteen different subjects, each inclosed in a parenthesis of its own, with here and there extra parentheses which reinclose three or four of the minor parentheses, making pens within pens: finally, all the parentheses and reparentheses are massed together between a couple of king-parentheses, one of which is placed in the first line of the majestic sentence and the other in the middle of the last line of it --after which comes the VERB, and you find out for the first time what the man has been talking about; and after the verb -- merely by way of ornament, as far as I can make out -- the writer shovels in "haben sind gewesen gehabt haben geworden sein," or words to that effect, and the monument is finished. I suppose that this closing hurrah is in the nature of the flourish to a man's signature -- not necessary, but pretty. German books are easy enough to read when you hold them before the looking-glass or stand on your head -- so as to reverse the construction -- but I think that to learn to read and understand a German newspaper is a thing which must always remain an impossibility to a foreigner.'
The above is an excerpt from an essay by Mark Twain titled, 'The Awful German Language.' (Full essay here: http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/awfgrmlg.html#x1 ).
What can I say. German is not an easy language. There are days when I am confident in my skills and days when I feel like I can't say anything right. I started teaching myself German back in 2009 and have taken courses here and there. I recently finished an intensive course at the University of Vienna. It lasted 4 months and I spent 2.5 hours everyday submerged in this course (not to mention to 2-3 hours spent studying outside of the course). At times, I've felt like progress has been slow and not very noticeable. Compared to when I moved back here a few months ago, I'd say I'm doing pretty good. I can read the newspapers without looking up every word and can carry on conversations in German. One major difficulty is speaking in German with Nico. We can be quite successful at it...for about 20 minutes until we inevitably end up speaking in English. It's not a problem with my level of German but more a problem that we met in English and have spoken English ever since. It's really hard to make that linguistic switch in our relationship.
Back to why German can be so awful at times. I don't mind the word order in German, once you get used to it. In simple sentences, German word order is easy to take in. But as one progresses to a higher level, the sentence structure becomes increasingly frustrating at times. You could read a whole sentence and wait until the end to read the verb, and depending on how many verbs, it could signal passive past tense, subjunctive I or II, or simply the present tense. Verbs in German can just be all around confusing. There are separable verbs, inseparable verbs, reflexive verbs, verbs that take only one case, verbs that are combined with certain nouns to create a completely different meaning and verbs that are combined with a preposition and use exclusively one case. Sometimes I feel like I'm just swimming in a pool of verbs and struggling to find the right one.
The other difficulty of German, at least for me, is the case system. We have these in English but we really just don't learn about them or have declensions so that they change their ending, unlike German. German has four cases: nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. The purpose of cases is to denote the relationship of nouns and pronouns to other words in the sentence. Let's look at the dog in German, der Hund. The der could change to den, dem or des depending on what place the dog has in the sentence (subject, direct object, indirect object, or possessive object). Throw in an adjective and the ending of the adjective will change based on what case it is, for example, der lange Hund, den langen Hund, dem langen Hund, des langen Hundes. These are only the declensions for nouns. All of this would change if we wanted to say a dog instead of the dog. Not to mention, if we wanted to use any of the slew of different pronouns, those would also change case based on their function in the sentence. Keeping all this straight sometimes feels impossible!
These are only a couple of examples why German can be so perplexing, as Twain put it. It really can be hard getting everything right in a sentence. I have yet to find something that I find entertaining about the German language. I'm sure it will probably take a year or two until I can really communicate my thoughts and needs clearly without making grammatical mistakes. And after that, I then have to learn the Viennese dialect. Learning German is going to be a continual task but I'm up to it!
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