how fucking difficult german is

Even a writer as caliber as Mark Twain once wrote that german is awful. More than that, complicated. The rules were there to make your life more miserable. Twain didn't emphasis it with the f-word though.

So last night, at home, I took Der Grosse Deutsch-Test which was shown on RTL. The reason is, because I always love watching things on TV that I could play along with. Perhaps that's why I love TV-quizzes so much.

Other reason was that, after three years living here and almost four years studying the language (not intensively, of course) I just wanted to see how am I really doing with this broken german. Is it mendable broken? Or straight-to-the-garbage-can broken?

First test

OK. It was dictation. :D

I made 38 mistakes! :D (the snapshot was made after the show, though, so it doesn't reflect my real dictation test).

10 of them is due to the missing comma in my sentences. Dort ich Stunden lang bis ich endlich gefunden wurde, und zwar von einer phänomemal großen Spinne. I didn't use a comma for that sentence.

9 of them is because I can't differentiate between words that should have been written together or not. Like nichtsdestoweniger instead of nichts desto weniger. spazieren zu gehen instead of spazierenzugehen.

4 of them was spelling mistakes. Like I was writing misverständ instead of missverständ. I am so proud of this.

And 15 of them is because I made a hearing mistakes or never heard of the word. Like merkeln instead of Mäkeln, Schämel instead of Schemel, herrlichten instead of helllichten (come to think of it, that's not the correct way to spell herrlichsten as well.. :)) But I got hanebüchen correctly, eventhough many people in the studio neither have heard it or knew its meaning as well. YAY!

Second Test

Second series of test was twenty multiple choices problems divided into four categories: spelling (I kinda forgot the actual word), big or small letters (you see, German uses big letters in the middle of a sentence. sigh), Dudenspiel (guessing the meaning of a new German word that's been officially put to the Duden dictionary), punctuation marks (here I was hoping the most mistakes).

Annoyingly, I still made tons of mistakes in this test. Nine, that is. I made, respectively, one, four, three and one mistakes in each category. Very surprised in the last one.

Some of the mistakes were made because I didn't know any rules for the problem .. :) Some were unfamiliarity with words on the problems (especially on the Dudenspiel). And some because, well, people made mistakes. :D

So anyway, in total, I accumulated 47 mistakes, which earned me the most bottom group of people who took the test last night. Hurrah! I was kinda disappointed, though. I thought I would do better than the bottom. The upper limit for the group was 45, so I was three mistakes too much.

But it was unbelievably shocking to see how they decided the limits for the notes.

So, Mr. Twain. Where can we find a time to sit together over a coffee to talk about that awful language also known as German?

PS: Wanna play along?