I have encouraged many of my friends to learn German just so they can understand the comedic brilliance of "The Awful German Language".
For those who have studied German but haven't read Twain yet: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Awful_German_Language
"Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth."