Speaking of difficult-to-learn languages, I have studied some Japanese (still working on kanji, I’m only up to a 6th grade level at the moment) and am in the process of studying Chinese, and both are much easier to me than German even though I’m older now. Chinese to me is a very musical language where a word or sentence structure often just has to “sound right” to be right, in my opinion. I’m learning Mandarin Chinese, by the way, since I’m not so sure whether my ear can distinguish between nine or even more tones of some other dialects. Japanese is a very “logical” language, pronunciation-wise somewhat between French, German and English.

My major problems with German were with the pronunciation, as noted in John’s blog entry, “ö” is almost impossible to do right if you’ve not had a similar sound composition ingrain itself in your speech apparatus while you were still developing. It is somewhat irksome to me that even after six years of actively speaking and using German I’m still incapable of speaking accent-free unless I concentrate very much.

Building vocabulary is just about the same for me in every single language- I’ll have to say that I’m someone who learns best if wholly immersed in a new language, without recourse to familiar fields and without grammar or vocabulary lists. The only language where I had to use SOME grammar lists was German since- I’m very, very sorry to say!- it seemed to neither have a “logical” rhythm nor a melody I could follow (e.g. like French). I know that case-wise it is still in the lower field- what are four against Latin’s six (if you don’t count the different ablatives as separate cases), or Finnish’s thirty-somethings? Latin I studied, Finnish I’m happy to leave to the native speakers (too many “ö” sounds in there for me, too, sorry!)…

I guess the human brain can process anything as long as it really wants to- but I’ll say that German is doing its d*mn best to make that rather difficult.

Liebe Grüße

Manuela

1. Alle Deutschsprachigen, die sich über diese Webseite oder ihren Inhalt aufregen, sollten sich die Mühe machen die einleitenden Sätze zu lesen (85% Wahrheit und 15% Unsinn, Halbwahrheiten, Falsches) und/oder sollten vielleicht nochmal in den Keller gehen, um ihren verloren geglaubten Humor rauskramen.

2. All native English speakers which take an offense if unasked talked in (D)English to: Don’t take it. Those people just try to make your stay more comfortable.

3. German words alone are pretty easy to learn. But be warned: The grammar will be killing (at least 1 exemption to every rule, at least 2 ways to build a sentence, 3 differently expressed genders, 4 cases) That’s why German is listed as one of the hardest to learn languages.

4. Whoever said English is easy to learn, should try to express “a group of certain animals”. Just a few examples:
- a HERD of horses
- a FLOCK of sheep
- a PRIDE of lions
- a LODGE of beaver
- a MURDER of crows
And there are a lot more!!!

Finally: This website was made to get a few laughs out of the oddities of German language and behavio(u)r and I got quite a few reading the stuff above the comments. Good work!

——
The horizon of most people is a circle with a radius of zero. They call it their point of view. (Albert Einstein)

Wow, I guess ignorance attracts ignorance.

The “tonations” are NOT ‘impossible,’ you’re prbably just tone deaf. There are only FOUR of them. How incredilby challenging can this possibly be for you? Ma1, ma2, ma3, ma4. Just practice for half an hour every day for two weeks, you’ll get it. You are either stupid or lazy or both.

But the real icing on the cake is you referring to the eight thousand year old writing system as “outlandish.” What are you, some kind of freak that just crawled out from under a rock? How can you make such an imbecilic comment? You sad fool. Again, you are probably either spacially challenged, lazy, stupid, or any combination of the three.

Start with five characters a week and write each one ten to thirty times a day, taking care to use the correct number of strokes and stroke direciton and you’ll get it eventually. How ironic you’d call it “outlandish” when, in fact, fifty years ago the PRC even SIMPLIFIED it to make it as idiot proof as possible. But I guess you won’t be satisfied until they give up on their “outlandish” writing system and start using the Latin alphabet, eh?

Morons leading morons.

The second point smacks of ignorance and arrogance, a deadly combination. Again: just because some people seem to have some kind of inexplicable malfunction when it comes to mastering certain sounds (give me a break — after an entire year, there is no reason you should not be able to properly pronounce the ‘r’ in ‘rechts’ or the ‘ch’ in ‘ich’ unless you are challenged in some way) does not mean Germans will “always speak German better.”

Less than three years after I began learning the language German speakers would have to talk with me at least ten minutes until they began suspecting it was not my native language. Even then, the only thing that gave it away was that I would sometimes pause to search for pertinent vocabulary when discussing complicated topics.

You sound lazy, arrogant, and ethnocentric. You should just leave Germany if you don’t love it and have no plans to integrate. The States is a great place for that type.