AMD 6

I read Mark Twain's "The Awful German Language." There are tons of references to it in my CompLit class and so I finally read it. I used the link here:
http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/awfgrmlg.html
It is a pretty funny essay. I wouldn't have understood a lot of it if I hadn't known German already. He talks about verb placement, adjective endings, and genders of nouns. They are things that seem very strange to native English speakers. Although Mark Twain makes fun of German, he is still very proficient in it and has studied it extensively. It is more like a roast of an old friend than a mean-spirited hate letter. He talks about the word "schlag" and how it has so many different meanings.He discusses the length of some German words, and how "also" often slips into spoken German (at least when Mark Twain visited).
I would recommend other students of German to read this essay, it is informative and funny, and Mark Twain says a lot of things I think we have all been thinking to ourselves.