Sometimes I'm asked what it's like to learn German. Is it difficult or easy? In trying to describe my own experience, I've come to rely on the following exercise: try, for the next five minutes, to speak backwards in English. That is, instead of saying, "That's a stupid idea fit for a fool" you would say "fool a for fit idea stupid a that's". Of course, this is only roughly approximate and in some ways is more difficult than speaking German, but it highlights what I think is the most difficult aspect of the language to grasp, and that's its word order, especially the placement of the verb.
Mark Twain, in his hilarious essay on "The Awful German Language" published as an appendix to his 1880 book A Tramp Abroad, has said it best:
German books are easy enough to read when you hold them before the looking-glass or stand on your head - so as to reverse the construction - but I think that to learn to read and understand a German newspaper is a thing which must always remain an impossibility to a foreigner.
The sentence construction in German is best brought out by rendering a literal translation into English. And once again, Mark Train has a sterling example. He writes:
I will make a perfectly literal translation, and throw in the parenthesis-marks and some hyphens for the assistance of the reader - though in the original there are no parenthesis-marks or hyphens, and the reader is left to flounder through to the remote verb the best way he can:
'But when he, upon the street, the (in-satin-and-silk-covered- now-very-unconstrained-after-the-newest-fashioned-dressed) government counselor's wife MET,' etc., etc.
That is from THE OLD MAMSELLE'S SECRET, by Mrs. Marlitt. And that sentence is constructed upon the most approved German model. You observe how far that verb is from the reader's base of operations...
Precisely.
All joking aside, once you get past the initial difficulties, German opens up in quite extraordinary ways. In fact, I now find the deutsche Sprache to be quite rhythmic and beautiful. Ich liebe es!