I think German is still probably easier. French and italian are more unfamiliar imo. Most of those words have English cognates. We wir, haben, have, letztes last, wochen week, ende, end, gespeilt no cognate.
I'm a native English speaker who learned French. French has a ton of cognates with English also. You vous, reason raison, season saison, final finale, simple simple, clock cloche, one un, etc
Dutch and German are closely related, and share overlap with a good number of words.
English is sort of weird case when it comes to language, as it has effectively gone off in its own direction compared to the other languages it shares its roots with. Several books on the topic are available, such as Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue.
I'm an Afrikaans native speaker, so I approached the languages from a bit of a different angle. However, I'd say German is more difficult to learn in terms of linguistic structure and vocabulary, especially with the case system that meh mentioned, while the pronunciation in Dutch is a bit trickier. In essence, if you can gargle, roll your r's and spit, you can speak German. With Dutch it's a bit more melodic.
Very well put! I'm not a native speaker in any way. I took German in throughout all of high school and have a friend from the Netherlands and we were just about able to understand one another.
I wouldn't place it there. German is the only (indo-european) language I know that has three grammatical genders, including another six variations (sometimes in abbreviated forms) which you bump into as soon as you realise that prepositions dictate accusative and datives (e.g. making feminine into masculine) .
English itself is considered a germanic language so it actually is easy for english speakers to become proficient in german and vice versa.
However mastering is another story. In this case the similarity of the languages causes you to make a lot of wrong assumptions.
I speak both English and German as a foreign language, so I can observe both sides of the struggle from a neutral point of view.
I think German's biggest hurdle for English speakers is the more complex grammar system. I took two years of Latin in high school and despised the ridiculous number of possible endings a verb could have depending on case, number, person, etc., but I feel like German might have a manageable number. Basic German to me feels very... natural, I suppose is the word, so I hope to master it someday (far in the future).
I've never officially learned Deutsch but through a few people I know, I've been able to easily grasp simple snippets of the language. If a conversation is fairly simple I can follow bits and pieces. English is the bastardisation of a lot of European languages, we should have no issue picking them up as our language was built using them.
That's why I'm working on learning German over anything else. Every now and then I'll run across something like "beer" to "bier" or "house" to "haus". What kills me about French or Spanish is words having a gender. It always throws me off. However that's nothing compared to having to memorize thousands of characters to learn Japanese or Chinese.
I guess German language fits in the "easy" category too? It definitely should. For an English speaker it is probably the easiest of them all to learn.
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I found German and Dutch to be very similar. However, from what i've heard around, German was suppose to be a more difficult language.
I'm an Afrikaans native speaker, so I approached the languages from a bit of a different angle. However, I'd say German is more difficult to learn in terms of linguistic structure and vocabulary, especially with the case system that meh mentioned, while the pronunciation in Dutch is a bit trickier. In essence, if you can gargle, roll your r's and spit, you can speak German. With Dutch it's a bit more melodic.
Very well put! I'm not a native speaker in any way. I took German in throughout all of high school and have a friend from the Netherlands and we were just about able to understand one another.
English is a germanic language, but German has a (relatively simple but still present) case system, which adds just one more chart to memorize.
I wouldn't place it there. German is the only (indo-european) language I know that has three grammatical genders, including another six variations (sometimes in abbreviated forms) which you bump into as soon as you realise that prepositions dictate accusative and datives (e.g. making feminine into masculine) .
English itself is considered a germanic language so it actually is easy for english speakers to become proficient in german and vice versa. However mastering is another story. In this case the similarity of the languages causes you to make a lot of wrong assumptions.
I speak both English and German as a foreign language, so I can observe both sides of the struggle from a neutral point of view.
I understand what you mean. It does actually make sense. Some languages may be easier to learn at a casual level, but harder to be truly good at.
at the very least, many words are similar in both English and German.
e.g. apple, apfel
I think German's biggest hurdle for English speakers is the more complex grammar system. I took two years of Latin in high school and despised the ridiculous number of possible endings a verb could have depending on case, number, person, etc., but I feel like German might have a manageable number. Basic German to me feels very... natural, I suppose is the word, so I hope to master it someday (far in the future).
I've never officially learned Deutsch but through a few people I know, I've been able to easily grasp simple snippets of the language. If a conversation is fairly simple I can follow bits and pieces. English is the bastardisation of a lot of European languages, we should have no issue picking them up as our language was built using them.
Frisian is kind of like the halfway point between German and English. I bet that's even easier.
That's why I'm working on learning German over anything else. Every now and then I'll run across something like "beer" to "bier" or "house" to "haus". What kills me about French or Spanish is words having a gender. It always throws me off. However that's nothing compared to having to memorize thousands of characters to learn Japanese or Chinese.
Why do gendered nouns kill you about Spanish and French, but not German? They only have 2 noun genders while German has 3.
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