How difficult is German?

???   Mon Dec 14, 2009 10:42 pm GMT
That's what I think, as a non-native speaker listening in, it sounds almost totally native at first. I think he has got the accent and intonation down really well, and he speaks really quickly and fluently. It's only when I listen closely I notice the grammar is quite often wrong. I just wonder how native German speakers perceive him. Do the inflectional mistakes matter that much to them, or doesn't it matter that much, because the overall effect is very native sounding? Or maybe it isn't, it just sounds like that to me. It must be pretty good though, as he is permitted to present TV shows.
English and German as for   Mon Dec 14, 2009 11:10 pm GMT
@???: I am not fraz. And I never wrote that English is easy. I just said that German is not as logical as you believe.

"...And of course you could still be saying 'Ich habe das Pferd geritten, where English might demand 'I was riding the horse', 'I have been riding the horse', 'I did ride the horse'..."

This is only half true.
"I was riding the horse" is not always equivalent to "Ich habe das Pferd geritten". The same with "I have been riding the horse".
For example, If you want to say 'I was riding the horse when it started to rain', you must say "Ich ritt das Pferd gerade, als es anfing zu regnen". The sentence " Ich habe das Pferd geritten, als es anfing zu regnen" is not completely right.
In the colloquial language you can also turn the verb into a noun and use a preposition like "bei" or "an" to express continuity in the past:
"ich war beim Essen, als sie nach Hause kam" (widely used in colloquial language), or "ich war am Essen, als sie nach Hause kam" (right, though it sounds strange to me). These variants are also OK: "ich aß gerade, als sie nach Hause kam" or ich habe gerade gegessen, als sie nach Hause kam. All these sentences can be translated as 'I was eating when she came home'.
But "ich habe gegessen, als sie nach Hause kam" is not completely right.


"...And what about the emphatic forms in English? 'I did see it' as opposed to 'I saw it'. I know it is often equivalent to something like 'Ich habe es doch gesehen', but still this is definitely an aspect of English which is more complex, not least because it involves a change in morphology."


What about:
Ich habe es doch gesehen
Ich habe es ja doch gesehen
or:
Das meint sie nicht ernst
Das meint sie ja nicht ernst
Das meint sie ja doch nicht ernst
Or the function of "mal" and doch in imperative sentences:
Ruf sie an= call her up
Ruf sie mal an= call her up
Ruf sie doch mal an= call her up
Although all these three sentences can be translated as 'call her up', there is a subtle difference in meaning between them in German. The same holds true for the other examples with "nicht" "ja nicht" and "ja doch nicht" and "ja doch".

And talking complexities, please compare the passive voice in German and English.
???   Tue Dec 15, 2009 1:07 am GMT
Yes, German does have some difficult uses of little words like 'doch', ja', 'mal'. Sometimes the usage is harder for an English speaker to get than at others. I would say 'mal' is fairly easy to pick up just from listening, 'ja', is probably the hardest as far as I'm concerned. But 'doch' is probably the easiest, and I don't think you have translated your examples correctly. In general 'Ruf sie mal an' would translate into English as 'Give her a call', whereas 'Ruf sie doch mal an' would tend to translate as 'Do give her a call'. Actually, 'ruf sie an', is more like 'call her' while 'ruf sie mal an' is more like 'give her a call', although it's true the differentiation in English isn't strict.

The examples you give of what tense to use in German, if the subclause starts with 'als' are obviously complex, but that's only one example. Surely there are tons of examples in English where you have to distinguish between using simple/progressive. It's not always about expressing what you are doing at an exact moment. For example, I might say 'He's insisting it's not a good idea'. I don't necessarily mean he is insisting right at this moment that said thing is not a good idea, I just mean he has been, and continues to insist that something is not a good idea.

As for the passive, what's hard about that in German? Unless I've missed something huge, it's just formed with the verb 'werden', whereas in English, sometimes the verb 'be' is is right while at others the verb 'get' seems more appropriate. Or do you mean things like 'Es wird gesungen'. Yes I admit that kind of thing has been a while, but I seem to recall German uses this kind of structure, where English would say 'People are singing'. Is one harder than the other here?
???   Tue Dec 15, 2009 1:32 am GMT
Maybe you should read this dissertation by one of your fellow Germans regarding the acquisition of the English tense/aspect system by native German speakers.

http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/phil/english/chairs/linguist/documents/Duerich_MAGarete2.pdf

Note the following:

>>The underlying hypothesis of this paper is that the English tense and aspect system
cannot entirely be acquired by German adult learners of English, or at least poses a
major problem on them in that they have to reset the parameter of expressing time, they
have to process information on temporal reference cognitively on the basis of their (....)
preexisting linguistic knowledge.<<
???   Tue Dec 15, 2009 1:43 am GMT
Plus note that even the author of this thesis gets their sentence structure wrong here: It should read:

'or at least poses a major problem FOR them'. If only it could just read 'poses them a major problem'. Why not?
English and German as for   Tue Dec 15, 2009 10:00 am GMT
@???: What's your point? Is it the degree of difficulty of learning German as a foreign language? Or is it to prove that English as a foreign language is more difficult to learn than German as a foreign language? Or is it to discuss that it is very hard for Germans to master English? If it is the latter, you can open a new topic and we can discuss about it, since there are several aspects of English (in addition to verb tenses), which are very difficult to master for a native speaker of German. For example the pronunciation of certain phonemes. Words like 'but', 'duck', 'butt', 'bud', 'buddy', etc. are pronounced wrong by 99% of Germans, they use the pronunciation of the letter "a" in German to pronounce those words in English. A similar case occurs with the pronunciation of words like 'body' or 'dock', most Germans use here again the sound of their 'a', so that they do not distinguish between dock and duck, or between 'buddy' and 'body', etc.

Back to the topic of this thread: I've learned both English and German as foreign languages. And according to my experience German is definitively more difficult to learn than English. Due to its three gender system together with inflections of articles, adjectives and noun declination (masculine genitive, plural dative), it takes foreigners a long time and a lot of effort and practice to speak German as naturally as native speakers. For example, while in English you only have the definite article "the", in German you have 14 possibilities depending on the gender, case and grammatical number. And if you add the inflections of adjectives, it gets more cumbersome for a non-native speaker of German to speak naturally, not to mention to speak as genuine as a native speaker. The same applies when you are writing a text spontaneously. I've never said that it is impossible to memorize the rules and apply them (this is not the problem), I just mean it is cumbersome for beginners to use those rules naturally. And that hampers enormously the learning of the language, especially if your mother tongue is an uninflected language like, e.g. English, or Spanish (though Spanish is not as uniflected as English).
reality   Tue Dec 15, 2009 11:13 am GMT
though Spanish is not as uniflected as English).

Spanish is much more inflected than English!!

these are all English inflections: s/es/er/est/'s/ed, very few indeed!

Just one verb tense in Spanish has more endings than all English!!
fraz   Tue Dec 15, 2009 11:35 am GMT
English and German are different languages and there will be occasions where a tense in one language doesn't directly correlate to the other. For example, in English you say "I've been shot" but in German the verb werden comes into play. Learning German as an English speaker also makes you aware of the quirks of your own language, such as "could" expressing two opposingly different tenses, or "when " being used to describe both past and future events, German having separate labels for all of these situations.

The der-die-das thing is a major obstacle but here's the rub, you don't need to master this in order to speak perfectly understandable German. I probably only get the genders right 70% of the time and if I don't know whether a word is male, female or neuter then I'll simply guess. But that doesn't prevent you from being understood. Of course, it's nice to get it right but as a foreigner, nobody is expecting that from you anyway.
Carpenter Fred   Wed Dec 16, 2009 7:52 pm GMT
For native English speakers German pronunciation is a bit tricky but I think that it is still quite easy... I know that both languages share few identical vowel sounds : /a*, i, ə, ɪ, ʊ, aɪ, aʊ, uː*, iː, oː*, /...

Well, certain English dialects have:

a* - sound used in most accents of British Isles instead old fashioned /æ /

u:* - in Northern USA, Southern Ireland

o:* in Estuary English, Australian English...
bruno   Sat Dec 26, 2009 8:23 pm GMT
I found this to be very funny...

http://nothingforungood.com/2008/05/12/dont-learn-german/

Though, I don't want anybody here to be intimidated learning German.