This language complicated it all he could.
When we wish to speak of our "good friend or friends,"
in our enlightened tongue, we stick to the one form and have
no trouble or hard feeling about it; but with the German
tongue it is different. When a German gets his hands
on an adjective, he declines it, and keeps on declining
it until the common sense is all declined out of it.
It is as bad as Latin. He says, for instance:
SINGULAR
Nominative - Mein gutER Freund, my good friend.
Genitives - MeinES GutEN FreundES, of my good friend.
Dative - MeinEM gutEN Freund, to my good friend.
Accusative - MeinEN gutEN Freund, my good friend.
PLURAL
N. - MeinE gutEN FreundE, my good friends. G. - MeinER gutEN
FreundE, of my good friends. D. - MeinEN gutEN FreundEN,
to my good friends. A. - MeinE gutEN FreundE, my good friends.
Now let the candidate for the asylum try to memorize
those variations, and see how soon he will be elected.
One might better go without friends in Germany than take
all this trouble about them. I have shown what a bother
it is to decline a good (male) friend; well this is
only a third of the work, for there is a variety of new
distortions of the adjective to be learned when the object
is feminine, and still another when the object is neuter.
Now there are more adjectives in this language than there
are black cats in Switzerland, and they must all be as
elaborately declined as the examples above suggested.
Difficult?
