There's this guy in my German class who I like to think of as Mr. Testosterone. Booming voice, greasy baseball cap-wearing too-cool-for-school kinda guy. Evidently this semester for him is Deutsch 101 part deux. Despite having heard all of this information once before, he can't help but comment loudly whenever our instructor's explanations are not up to his standards or when confronted with a peculiarity of the language.
Today the instructor was explaining weak masculine nouns which change in an odd way when going from the nominative case to the accusitive case. If you don't know what that means, don't worry, neither did most of the class. The point is that it's an exception, a peculiarity in the language that you just have to memorize. So Mr. Testosterone starts in on the teacher. "Oh my gawd...that is the stupidest thing I have ever seen. Why don't they change that? That's ridiculous! What a stupid language!" etc. Yes, that's correct - German is 'stupid'. Why don't they change the German language so snot-nosed punk American kids can learn it more easily?
Frau Teacher did her best to answer the honest questions coming from the other students, but I couldn't help being amazed at 1)his total lack of respect for our instructor and 2)his reaction of contempt in the face of something he didn't understand. I mean, English is way more complicated and has many more exceptions. German isn't harder or weirder, it's just different. And this guy had zero tolerance for anything different than him or from anything he knew. Scary, scary.
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