There a joke about a German member of parliament arriving late for important speech being given given in the Bundestag. The speaker had already been speaking for 10 minutes so the MP whispers to his colleague "What have I missed?" The colleague replies "I don't know, he hasn't got to the verb yet!"

Mark Twain wrote his essay "The Awful German Language" in 1880, so it would be very hard for him to use any modern day examples from the 21st Century. The text is 146 years old.

In English only proper nouns have capitals so names of people, languages, countries etc.

German is NOT complicated! I was able to learn it since I was born! 😜

We do use Ausbruch or Vulkanausbruch for volcanic eruptions, which are quite explosive.

We still do break up words, we just don't put such long distances between the parts. ("Ich REISE heute AB", "Ich HÖRE dir ZU", "Ich PASSE auf dich AUF".) Similarly, we would not be putting the danken (or töten) at the end of that sentence anymore (if we were to make it that long at all), but put in front of the comma. So "Ich möchte der Dame, die [...] , danken." becomes "Ich möchte der Dame danken, die [...]."

“Handy” is an adjective that means useful or capable.
“Handy” can also be a sexual slang noun that means hand-job.
So yes, we think it’s hilarious and cute when German speakers innocently mention their Handy.

In English nouns don't gets capitals but "proper nouns" do. You always stick a capital letter at the very start of a sentence, for the word "I"(me), and when it's a name. "John" and "Mary" get capital letters. So does "Google", because that's a name too. "The National History Museum" gets capital letters. "Doctor Who" gets capital letters also. As does "Germany".

General nonspecific nouns like "table" or "book", don't. As soon as you're talking about a super specific book though it generally gets its capital letters back in its title because it's treated as a name again, like in "The Domesday Book", or "The Bible". Very confusing at first but it's like the only language rule English has that is actually consistent across the entire thing.

You also see all-caps in "acronyms" and "initialisms" like "RADAR" or "BBC" but that's the same in German and most other languages I think so probably no trouble there?

By the way the Reason why its "das Mädchen" is because all diminutive words in German are considered neuter. (Basically all ending in either "-lein" or "-chen" ).

My German is 50 years old so hearing there is a German Youth Word of the Year.  Das Crazy!

I lived in germany for over 3 years and I found German to be a soft spoken language. It was so quiet riding the street cars. Your old German text is beautiful and doesn't need to be associated with anything negative.

Bear in mind, the text quoted at 4:00 was drawn by Mark Twain from a novel presumably published in the 1800's or so. If we read English from the same time period (Charles Dickens for example) it is also different in style from modern English. If we go earlier to Jane Austen the style is even more different.

It's far, far worse. Are they really saying they have a language that can't even tell you if something is male, female or inanimate? My theory is this: The "German language" is an elaborate practical joke, perpetrated by the people of Germany, all of whom really speak English. During the war they decided to pretend they had this elaborate language, that was too complicated for the Americans to understand, and used it as code. They made up a few common words (Ja, Nein, etc.) to give to the auslanders, and then just made up something that sounded somewhat like a language for the rest. They use it to make fun of tourists these days, while at home they all watch reruns of "Friends" in English.

I think the difference between swear words in Germany and the UK is the attitude towards them. In Germany, radio will play the original version of "Fuck You" by Cee Lo Green in the middle of the afternoon, while in the UK, they play the censored "Forget You" version. There was an advert for a low calorie food brand with the slogan "fuck the diet!" that was even played between kids programs in Germany. In the UK, TV hosts have to say "we do apologise for the language" if a caller says a swear word. In Germany, a primary school kid can say "the weather is shit today" to their teacher and the teacher will just agree, while in the UK, even secondary school teachers will spend half the lesson language policing.

Don't forget, Mark Twain was a humorist.  His writing was intentionally provocative!

It’s such an interesting coincidence that Eichhörnchen is the exemplar of a difficult German word fit English speakers, while squirrel is the word that we love to hear Germans try to pronounce. It’s usually hilarious no matter who is attempting whose word.

You, however, pronounce squirrel perfectly. Rare!

Holy, I burst into laughter when you mentioned the German subreddit. 😄😄

If  something is at hand, it is handy.  That is where handy comes from.

The word "squirrel" in English originally derives from the Ancient Greek "σκίουρος" ("skiouros"), which means "shade tail". We borrowed the word from the Norman French "esquirel", itself derived from the Old French "escureil", which came from the  Latin "sciurus" and originally from Ancient Greek as I mentioned. The modern French word is "écureuil", which is masculine. *

If your teachers really said British English doesn't capitalise  nouns, they were only partly correct. We capitalise the initial letters if a noun starts a sentence or if it is a proper noun. A proper noun  is the only example of a thing, for example, someone's name, a pet's name or names of countries, cities, towns, languages, days of the week, months, specific celestial bodies such as the Sun and the Moon and so on. However, a generic noun used to refer to a non-specific sun or moon is not capitalised, but months and days  of the week are always capitalised - even if generic - for example, "I don't like Mondays". There are more complicated stylistic rules for forming titles of books, films and songs, such as "I Don't Like Mondays" - a song by The Boomtown Rats. Such rules are usually determined by the in-house style guide of a publishing company, record company, movie company or whatever.

American English doesn't enforce  capitalisation of proper nouns as strongly - as you might have noticed in the end credits of Hollywood movies. They also spell "capitalise" as "capitalize".

I'd like to reintroduce the use of the second person nominative pronoun "thou" and its objective, possessive and reflexive case forms "thee", "thy/thine" and "thyself" in English, as I feel we could do with an informal version of "you", However, I think I'd be wildly unsuccessful.

Oh, I forgot to mention that the first person nominative pronoun "I" in English is always capitalised. Some American also like to write it as "i", which is uncharacteristically modest of them.

ETA: * Pre-Norman invasion words for squirrel included "íkorni" from Old Norse and "ācweorna" (oak-gnawer or oak-squealer) from Anglo-Saxon.

No wonder I couldn't learn German it really is complicated and I don't have hundreds of years to grasp it, I imagine it's just natural when you are young because learning is so much easier when you are young.

As Jonathan says, English distinguishes between common nouns and proper nouns. Proper nouns (the names of people, places, formal institutions, companies etcetera) are capitalized: David, France, Washington, Mercedes-Benz, Department of Transportation, Mercy Hospital. All other nouns, common nouns, are not capitalized (except at the start of a sentence).