AMD 4

I read Mark Twain's "The Awful German Language." I thought it was really funny because it was so relatable to language learners. What he said about the rule exceptions is so true. I remember in Spanish when we would learn all the irregular verbs and grammar exceptions it seemed like that list was longer than the verbs that were conjugated regularly. I'm sure this is equally frustrating when learning German or any language where you have to conjugate verbs. It will be interesting to learn more of the cases since that whole system is new to me and different from English. Like Twain I'm still confused by the total separation of the verbs and subjects in some cases. It seems like by the time you put in all the rest of the predicate and finally reach the verb at the end, you forget who the original subject was. It was really interesting to read about the gender of the different things, I always wonder how they decided the gender of everything. In Spanish the gender system seems to have a pretty logical order most of the time, but in German when you add in the Neuter it gets really confusing. The example he gave about the turnip and the lady was really interesting. The fact that the turnip is referred to as "her" while the lady is referred to as "it" is really strange. It was also interesting to read about how all of the different body parts all have different genders assigned to them. I wonder how they decided what gender all of the nouns would have. The paragraph about Schlag and Zug was really funny, it's weird to think that one word can mean so many different things. When I was reading I was sort of comparing what he was saying about German to English and I guess I found many of the same things to be true, like how one word can mean multiple things. The part about the compound words really caught my attention because I think this is one of the most distinct parts of German. I don't really understand why they don't put spaces but those huge words are really funny! Overall it was a really funny paper to read and I would recommend it to any language learner; it's so true.