vailian

An entry by Heidi got me thinking about my living for quite a while in a foreign country but not mastering the language, and I wonder if any other expats have this problem? I never studied German, had to learn by doing so to speak...my German is still grammatically faulty on a fairly basic level even after 20-odd years, I cannot seem to get the Dativ, Genitiv, Akkusativ endings right for the life of me! And the Germans, unfortunately, tend to equate grammar mistakes with sub-human intelligence or abject Turkishness, so I am leery of commiting anything to paper. The speaking and comprehension bit is not so bad, my method is to mumble when I get to the end of a declineable adjective or noun. People are bewildered that I can know all the big words and understand the dialects (yes, even Kölsch) and still get the "der, die, das, dem, den..." bits wrong.

Mark Twain wrote some really choice comments on Germany and its language after some extended travels in Europe... his most famous being the essay "The Awful German language". But there are other quotes, like:
Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

It is not like studying German, where you mull along, in a groping, uncertain way, for thirty years; and at last, just as you think you've got it, they spring the subjunctive on you, and there you are. No- and I see now plainly enough, that the great pity about the German language is, that you can't fall off it and hurt yourself. There is nothing like that feature to make you attend strictly to business.
- Taming the Bicycle
The Germans have an inhuman way of cutting up their verbs. Now a verb has a hard time enough of it in this world when it's all together. It's downright inhuman to split it up. But that's just what those Germans do. They take part of a verb and put it down here, like a stake, and they take the other part of it and put it away over yonder like another stake, and between these two limits they just shovel in German.
- Mark Twain's Speeches, "Disappearance of Literature"
I don't speak German well but several experts have assured me that I write it like an angel. Maybe so, maybe so- I don't know. I've not yet made any acquaintances among the angels. That comes later, whenever it please the Deity. I'm not in any hurry.
- Concordia speech, 11/2/1897

To be fair, he was even less complimentary about Dutch:
It is too smooth and blubbery; it reads like butter-milk gurgling from a jug.