Mark Twain had a notoriously thorny relationship with German, a language he gamely tried to conquer. His main beef was with its knotty grammar: ‘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.’
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Susie Dent, is the author of How to Talk Like a Local and What Made the Crocodile Cry? and is the resident lexicographer on Channel 4’s Countdown.
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