About This Book

Some books about a language teach it; this one testifies about it. The Awful German Language is Mark Twain’s celebrated essay on his own education in German, written from inside the struggle and published as a book that learners have handed to each other ever since, the way travellers pass on a warning and a joke in the same breath. Twain approaches German as a brilliant amateur — a professional writer in English confronting a language that seems engineered to humble professional writers.

His method is exaggeration built on exact observation. The jokes land because the underlying facts are real: German really does build words of startling length, really does scatter a verb’s parts across a sentence, really does assign genders that no reasoning from the object predicts. Twain merely refuses to pretend these things are easy, and that refusal, delivered in his voice, is what turned a learner’s complaint into a classic.

What Learners Will Practise

Recognising Their Own Difficulties

Reading Twain, learners practise the most undervalued skill in language study: naming what is actually hard. His essay itemises the pain points of German — gender, case, word order, the separable verb, the compound noun — with such clarity that students finish it able to say precisely where their own German hurts. A difficulty that can be named can be worked on; Twain’s comedy is secretly a diagnostic instrument.

Remembering Through Laughter

The features Twain mocks are, not coincidentally, the features learners must master. Exaggeration is a memory technology: the absurd image of a sentence’s verb arriving pages late, or of a word long enough to have its own perspective, fixes the underlying rule more firmly than sober statement does. Students find, months later, that Twain’s jokes surface at exactly the moment a construction is needed — humour doing the work of a flashcard.

Keeping Perspective When Progress Stalls

Every learner reaches the plateau where German feels impossible and personal inadequacy seems the only explanation. This book is the antidote kept in print: proof, from the highest literary authority, that the feeling is universal, survivable and even funny. Learners who read it practise resilience in its most useful form — continuing — armed with the knowledge that the language has humbled better writers than themselves.

Key Features

Its distinction is total: the only comic classic on a shelf of instruction, written in English by Mark Twain about the experience every other book on the shelf is trying to produce success in. It does not teach German systematically and does not pretend to; it does something the systematic books cannot — it makes the learner feel accompanied.

Who This Book Is For

Learners of German at every level are its readers, from the beginner who needs to know the struggle is normal to the advanced student who can finally savour every joke at full strength. Teachers of German keep it for the days a class needs heart. And readers who simply love Twain will find his voice in full possession of a subject he never mastered and never forgave — which is precisely the pleasure.

How to Use This Book

Read it when German has beaten you for a day; that is its intended hour. Keep a pencil nearby and mark every passage where Twain’s complaint matches a construction you are currently learning — then look that construction up in your coursebook while the joke is still warm, and notice how much more readily it stays. Reread it once a year of your German life: the measure of your progress is how much funnier, and how much more precise, it becomes.

Related Books

Learners ready to continue in earnest can take the friendly path of the Collins Easy Learning German Dictionary Book, or the next stage of a much-used course in Colloquial German 2 The Next Step in Language Learning Book.