Meisterschaft, oder: Even German is preferable to death: Englisch/Deutsch

by Mark Twain

Mit "The Meisterschaft System", einem für ihre Zwecke wenig geeigneten Deutsch-Sprachkurs, lernten Mark Twains Töchter Deutsch. Die teils absurden Lehrbuchsätze baute Twain in einen kurzen satirischen Dreiakter ein. Darin dürfen zwei junge amerikanische Ladies, die sich ein Jahr in Deutschland aufhalten, untereinander und mit ihren aus der Heimat angereisten Verehrern nur Deutsch sprechen. Zwerchfellerschütternd!"Welchen Hund haben Sie? Haben Sie den hübschen Hund des Kaufmanns,oder den hässlichen Hund der Urgroßmutter des Lehrlings des bogenbeinigen Zimmermanns?"Das kleine Stück erscheint hier samt Originaltext erstmals in deutscher Übersetzung.

Paperback

Published July 17, 2019

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist and essayist. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced," with William Faulkner calling him "the father of American literature." His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), with the latter often called the "Great American Novel." Twain also wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), and co-wrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) with Charles Dudley Warner.

Reviews

[Finja · Rating 3 out of 5]

mochte das ende war aber alles sehr kurz

[Annalina · Rating 4 out of 5]

In his play Meisterschaft, Mark Twain takes on the struggles and methods of foreign language learning, cultural emergence as well as parenting two daughters who are ready to disobey their father and his instructions.

For this, Twain bases his play on Richard S. Rosenthal's instructions for language learning. Here, the studious foreigner approaches the target language through the repetitions of fixed sentences rather than the acquisition of a functional understanding of vocabulary and grammar.