AMD 2

For this AMD I read Mark Twain's essay "The Awful German Language". It is eight pages long and packed full of critiques and humor. The German grammar discussed was relevant since I now know all the tenses except Genitiv. Twain really dislikes separable verbs and demonstrates how annoyingly long sentences can be packed between the two separable prefixes. He also talks about how the sound 'Sie' can mean you, her, she, it, they and them. To combat this confusion Twain says "...whenever a person says SIE to me, I generally try to kill him, if it is a stranger." I also liked how Twain noted that both females and males had body parts that were not of their same gender... definitely could cause a identity crisis. Apparently when speaking 'also' means 'you know' so that is a good phrase to buy one some time when they are trying to think of the rest of the sentence. After reading the whole essay one takes away that Twain (maybe) doesn't completely despise the German language and has hope for it yet. He praises the capitalization of nouns and has several ideas how to better the language: leave out the dative, fix gender problems with nouns, and fix the past perfekt tense. This AMD was beneficial because it was both funny and a good review of the confusing German grammar