German's Learning Difficulty

Guest   Fri Jun 13, 2008 3:56 pm GMT
As a Japanese, I very much wonder why (some) English-speaking people find German difficult. Of course learning a foreign language is never easy, but the two languages are so similar, both in grammar and in pronuncuation, that it has been easier to learn German through English than through my mother tongue, Japanese, at least for me. Well, German nowns have grammatical genders, the raison-d'etre of which I can never understand. But so do romance languages, nordic languages, and slavic languages, leaving English as a singular exception in Indo-European language family. German retains case decelnsion of nouns and adjectives, which has been obsoleted in romance languages and even in Dutch, a close kin of German. But IMHO the declension in German is a child's play compared to that in Latin or Greek.
PARISIEN   Fri Jun 13, 2008 4:21 pm GMT
Anybody can compose a few basic English sentences after a short training.
With German, the case declensions and the somewhat tricky grammar requires initially weeks of effort, but that effort is very rewarding.
Then it all goes downhill, cause German is amazingly logical, unambiguous and solidly built. In the long run it turns out to be easier than English (too many impredictible set locutions and obscure idioms...).
Gast   Fri Jun 13, 2008 5:06 pm GMT
<< German nowns have grammatical genders, the raison-d'etre of which I can never understand. But so do romance languages, nordic languages, and slavic languages, leaving English as a singular exception in Indo-European language family. >>

Persian doesn't have grammatical genders, either. And I'm sure a number of other Indo-European languages as well.

Never say never. ;)
Guest   Fri Jun 13, 2008 5:31 pm GMT
to Gast:
I didn't say "never".
Anyway I suppose that Persian abandoned gender sometime in the history. I would appreciate it if you could elaborate on that.
Guest   Fri Jun 13, 2008 5:35 pm GMT
You said it was a singular exception. It is not.
Guest   Fri Jun 13, 2008 5:44 pm GMT
As you must know, "a singular" is fairly different from "the only".
Guest   Fri Jun 13, 2008 5:47 pm GMT
sin·gu·lar (sĭng'gyə-lər)
adj.

1. Being only one; individual.
2. Being the only one of a kind; unique.
Guest   Fri Jun 13, 2008 5:59 pm GMT
Well, you maintain that "singular" is identical to "single". My English dictionary tells a different thing. I'm not sure and I'll leave it to native speakers of English.
Guest   Fri Jun 13, 2008 6:03 pm GMT
I am a native speaker, and you're wrong.
Guest   Fri Jun 13, 2008 6:19 pm GMT
Thank you very much for your teaching me. However, I definitely know the word " singlularity", the meaning of which is totally different from "singleness". Anyway, I wouldn't argue with a native speaker about English and this is my last post on this matter.
Guest   Fri Jun 13, 2008 6:58 pm GMT
I think people are exagerating about the German language. Declensions refer mainly to the articles (Nouns are declensed mainly in the genitive forms).
Maybe I'll give a simple example:

Ich sah DEN MANN(M)
Ich sah DIE Frau (F)
Ich habe EIN Auto (N)

As one can see the only thing that changes is the article...

One it comes to the genitive, things might change though

das Auto des Mannes
die Tasche der Frau
das Rad des Autos

Still, I guess there's no change in the feminine form of the genitive, which requires the student to learn only the forms of the articles.

I guess that it's difficult to write the so called "Nebensätze" because the order of sentences varies from time to time but it's something predicatable, too.

Vocabulary is pretty easy for English speakers (Hilfsverben for example are pretty similar in English and German such as können, müssen, sollen, wollen).

Even though I haven't used German for about 10 years I still remember it pretty well and it's regularity makes it a language which is difficult to forget and that comes back quickly when one has good notions of English and Latin.

Deutsch ist nicht so kompliziert!!

Ich möchte mich entschuldigen ob ich gramatische Fehler gemacht habe.
K. T.   Sun Jun 15, 2008 12:36 am GMT
I would say a "3" if you have never learned a language, and "2" if you already know two or three other languages. I suppose if you studied Latin or Russian, German wouldn't seem bad at all.

I won't discount the interest factor. If you are terribly interested in a language to the point of love, it will seem to be very easy.