The awful German language

Mark Twain has written about the horrors of learning German language in his famous essay of the same name, but I had not read it before enrolling for the class. The language is similar to Marathi or Hindi in that everything has a gender, masculine, feminine, neutral and plural, and there is absolutely no sense of logic to why things are the way they are. Now, the  Germans are great engineers, forever asking the question “why?” in all areas of science, but they clearly did not reflect on that when they were building their language. Why? Maybe  they thought “well,we have to focus on engineering anyway so why bother about language as long as we get the scientific terms right”

If you are not one of the fortunate few who have German as their first language, your battle with the tongue continues forever on two fronts: first, the complicated rules of grammar, second, painfully long words that are equally difficult to pronounce. One of my personal favourites is “Brandschutzmassnahmen” meaning “fire-safety measures”. To be frank, the fire might come and engulf you by the time you are done saying the word! But it doesn't end there. The Guinness book of World Records notes “Rechtsschtuzversicherungsgesselschften” , a 39-letter word to be the longest word in everyday use in German. Let me walk you through the word: Rechts(rights) schtuz (protection) Versicherung (insurance) Gesselschaften (companies), meaning insurance companies that also provide legal protection.

Still, this very feature of the German language provides some unique words that can catch subtle feelings . “schadenfreude” for example - the joy of watching others suffer, or “weltschmerzen” (welt-world, schmerzen -pain) the feeling of melancholy that you get when the reality of the world clashes with what you had imagined the world to be. (Here, the German language exactly sums up the feeling I got when I started learning it.)

Anyway, once you start getting to know the language, you get used to it, and often find yourself frustrated when you just can’t escape with forming such long words in other languages. It is fun to navigate through the rules and come up with word-combinations, and then discover to your surprise that some of the words really exist. Research suggest that learning a foreign language gets you curious to explore its vocabulary and culture and you tend to be more of an extroverted risk-taker when interacting or transacting in a foreign language. In other words, you become a different person when you speak a different language. For me, I would certainly have become a translator had I not been working with a “Massenkommunikationsdienstleistungsunternehmen” i.e. mass communication services company

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