In 1897, Mark Twain wrote: „A person who has not studied German can form no idea of what a perplexing language it is. Surely there is not another language that is so slip-shod and systemless, and so slippery and elusive to the grasp.“
The German language is definitely a challenge. Especially in a
German course for beginners there’s a lot to discover. …
Mark Twain refers above mainly to two aspects of German:
There are three articles – masculine, feminine and neutral – which are declined in four cases. So when you look over a text, you see lots of “der,” “den,” “ein,” “einen” and so on, and many words look similar, but have different endings, such as “gut,” “gute,” “guten,” “gutes.” This is no reason to panic. I can explain it to you!