Fun fact, despite being more closely related, German is considered somewhat harder to learn for English speakers than Romance languages (Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian). Due to historical events, conquests, migration, etc, more than half of our vocabulary derives from Latin (and a good chunk of that is from French).
I’m just going by the FSI rankings. Romance languages are “Category 1” necessitating 600-750 class hours. German is “Category 2” needing 900 hours.
I think vocabulary is more important anyhow, if you know the words you can piece together the meaning even if it’s in a strange order. If you don’t, the order doesn’t really matter at all.
disagree with your last point. you need to know the basic rules to use the words you know. but rules aren’t as numerous as all the words, so you usually get grammar out of the way and it’s all about vocabulary.
one thing about german though is that even vocabulary is more complicated because every noun comes with an article you need to memorize as well, in less intuitive ways than romance languages.
in most languages I’m familiar with there are two (masculine and feminine) and you can usually tell which ones are feminine because of the construction of the word. German has this to a degree with feminine words, but it’s not that consistent and the das/der distinction is, well, not even there. feels completely random to an outsider like me.
Sure but IMO understanding a language is a bigger and more important part of language learning than speaking. Being able to understand far, far, better than you can speak is very common among language learners. You need a foundation to draw upon before you can really effectively speak. And by then you’ll usually have gotten at least the very basics of the grammar down.
i think it’s the other way though. you’ll understand a language better once you have the basics of grammar down. that’s the foundation. and you learn words as you go along. that’s why auto-translation between languages that aren’t grammatically similar is so tough. the software has all the words, but it’s not easy to figure out the grammar so they can’t always make sense of sentences (or worse, they can often get the opposite meaning).
I mean you have a point but I still think a language with very different grammar but similar vocabulary is going to be miles easier than one with similar grammar but a small shared vocabulary.
And in my experience learning Spanish through basically just listening to it (a bit oversimplified, but I never have studied grammar nor have been explicitly taught vocab nor had translation) I picked up on the meaning through words way before I had any confidence in grammar. Of course I was getting a feel for the grammar the whole way little by little though.
Fun fact, despite being more closely related, German is considered somewhat harder to learn for English speakers than Romance languages (Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian). Due to historical events, conquests, migration, etc, more than half of our vocabulary derives from Latin (and a good chunk of that is from French).
OK, maybe I’m wrong, but that seems to be a MASSIVE miscomprehension of the relationship between West Germanic and olde French.
In fact, modern German is arguably EASIER to learn for English-speakers due to all the common grammar and sentence structure.
I’m just going by the FSI rankings. Romance languages are “Category 1” necessitating 600-750 class hours. German is “Category 2” needing 900 hours.
I think vocabulary is more important anyhow, if you know the words you can piece together the meaning even if it’s in a strange order. If you don’t, the order doesn’t really matter at all.
disagree with your last point. you need to know the basic rules to use the words you know. but rules aren’t as numerous as all the words, so you usually get grammar out of the way and it’s all about vocabulary.
one thing about german though is that even vocabulary is more complicated because every noun comes with an article you need to memorize as well, in less intuitive ways than romance languages.
How is the article less intuitive than in romance languages? They both have fairly arbitrary attributions.
in most languages I’m familiar with there are two (masculine and feminine) and you can usually tell which ones are feminine because of the construction of the word. German has this to a degree with feminine words, but it’s not that consistent and the das/der distinction is, well, not even there. feels completely random to an outsider like me.
Sure but IMO understanding a language is a bigger and more important part of language learning than speaking. Being able to understand far, far, better than you can speak is very common among language learners. You need a foundation to draw upon before you can really effectively speak. And by then you’ll usually have gotten at least the very basics of the grammar down.
i think it’s the other way though. you’ll understand a language better once you have the basics of grammar down. that’s the foundation. and you learn words as you go along. that’s why auto-translation between languages that aren’t grammatically similar is so tough. the software has all the words, but it’s not easy to figure out the grammar so they can’t always make sense of sentences (or worse, they can often get the opposite meaning).
I mean you have a point but I still think a language with very different grammar but similar vocabulary is going to be miles easier than one with similar grammar but a small shared vocabulary.
And in my experience learning Spanish through basically just listening to it (a bit oversimplified, but I never have studied grammar nor have been explicitly taught vocab nor had translation) I picked up on the meaning through words way before I had any confidence in grammar. Of course I was getting a feel for the grammar the whole way little by little though.