Twain describes his exasperation with German grammar in a series of eight humorous examples that include separable verbs, adjective declension, and compound words. Illustration of "The Awful German Language" in A Tramp Abroad Twain continued to give lectures into the 20th century regarding the language. On October 31, 1897, Twain delivered a lecture titled "Die Schrecken der deutschen Sprache" ("The Horrors of the German Language" in English) to the Concordia Festkneipe in Vienna (the Vienna Press Club). Gunnar Magnusson describes the work as "Twain's most famous philological essay". "The Awful German Language" was published in the second volume of Twain's A Tramp Abroad, 1880, as appendix D. Some of these people may understand English." During this 1878 stay in Germany, Twain had a dream in which, according to his notebook, "all bad foreigners went to German Heaven-couldn't talk and wished they had gone to the other place." Upon his arrival in Germany, the fruit of this recent scholarship was attested to in the advice of a friend: "Speak in German, Mark. He resumed his study 28 years later in preparation for a trip to Europe. Twain made his first unsuccessful attempt to learn German in 1850 at age fifteen. The essay is a humorous exploration of the frustrations a native speaker of English has with learning German as a second language. " The Awful German Language" is an 1880 essay by Mark Twain published as Appendix D in A Tramp Abroad.
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