text: Though Frederick used German as his working language with his administration and with the army, he claimed to have never learned it properly and never fully mastered speaking or writing it. He disliked the German language, thinking it inharmonious and awkward. He once commented that German authors "pile parenthesis upon parenthesis, and often you find only at the end of an entire page the verb on which depends the meaning of the whole sentence". He considered the German culture of his time, particularly literature and theatre, to be inferior to that of France, believing that it had been hindered by the devastation of the Thirty Years' War. He suggested that it could eventually equal its rivals, but this would require a complete codification of the German language, the emergence of talented German authors and extensive patronage of the arts by Germanic rulers, which he believed would take a century or more. Frederick's love of French culture was not without limits: he disapproved of the luxury and extravagance of the French royal court, and ridiculed German princes, especially Augustus III, who imitated French sumptuousness. His own court remained quite Spartan, frugal and small and restricted to a limited circle of close friends, similar to his father's court, though Frederick and his friends were far more culturally inclined.
  Despite his distaste for the German language, Frederick sponsored the  (Royal German Society), founded in 1741, the aim of which was to promote and develop the German language. He allowed the association to be titled "royal" and have its seat at the Königsberg Castle, but he does not seem to have taken much interest in its work. Frederick also promoted the use of German instead of Latin in law, as in the legal document  (Project of the Frederician Body of Laws), which was written in German with the aim of being clear and easily understandable. It was under his reign that Berlin became an important centre of German enlightenment.
  Architecture and the fine arts