Did Mark Twain speak German?

?2013-10-21T13:27:43Z

Enough to get by... actually, probably a good bit more than that! At this site:
http://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html
... is an essay that Mark Twain did write, and about German.
The site editors put this note onto it: "[This is Appendix D from Twain's 1880 book A Tramp Abroad. This text is basically a HTML conversion of the plain ASCII e-text formerly found at gopher://english.hss.cmu.edu:70/0F-2%3A2607%3AThe%20Awful%20German%20Language, with some further editing. Report errors to churchh@uts.cc.utexas.edu; note that the German orthography is that of the late 19th century.]" But read it all anyway if interested in German. It's still very funny, especially to German students from the mother-tongue-of-English point of view, even after more than a century. IMHO.

?2013-10-21T14:43:08Z

"I speak Spanish to God, French to men, Italian to women and German to my horse." Mark Twain