I know there's a lot of Europeans here, so sharing my language journey... I have been dating my German-born girlfriend for almost 5 years now (and have visited her family in Germany with her several times). Her entire family is trilingual, speaking English, French and German. I am essentially a hillbilly from Canada who can only speak English.
About a month ago, I decided to fire up Duolingo and have been aggressively learning german for 1-2 hours a day (I usually marathon 3-4 hours on Sundays). I'm listening to daily German podcasts and have all my Netflix shows subtitled in German. We're visiting her family again this Christmas and I thought it would be a good present to surprise her and converse with her in her native language.
I am now on day 30 of learning German and feel that I have learned enough to form some opinions about the language. I've been told many times over that English is unintuitive, doesn't make sense (their, there, they're) and has a lot of nonsensical rules. I was told that German (like the people) was efficient, sensible, not like that filthy English stuff. I am asserting that this is actually hogwash... perhaps even balderdash.
I won't go into detail because I feel like some of you are German and know these things. At the very least every single noun in the German language is gendered and done so randomly (don't lie to me). I've never spent so much time looking at an object trying to figure out whether it's masculine, feminine or neuter. This would be fine if the gender of these words didn't affect how you need to use every other word in a sentence.
The experience learning German is such a brutal and relatably confusing endeavour that Mark Twain actually wrote a book about it:
Right now this book is getting me through it because this shit is real:
I will say that I really appreciate that Germans just make new words by compounding existing words. It is amazing and terrifying to encounter 20+ letter words regularly. It's also really handy if you don't know the actual word. Example: I recently didn't know the word for feet so I said fleischschuhe (meat shoes). Really does the trick.
About a month ago, I decided to fire up Duolingo and have been aggressively learning german for 1-2 hours a day (I usually marathon 3-4 hours on Sundays). I'm listening to daily German podcasts and have all my Netflix shows subtitled in German. We're visiting her family again this Christmas and I thought it would be a good present to surprise her and converse with her in her native language.
I am now on day 30 of learning German and feel that I have learned enough to form some opinions about the language. I've been told many times over that English is unintuitive, doesn't make sense (their, there, they're) and has a lot of nonsensical rules. I was told that German (like the people) was efficient, sensible, not like that filthy English stuff. I am asserting that this is actually hogwash... perhaps even balderdash.
I won't go into detail because I feel like some of you are German and know these things. At the very least every single noun in the German language is gendered and done so randomly (don't lie to me). I've never spent so much time looking at an object trying to figure out whether it's masculine, feminine or neuter. This would be fine if the gender of these words didn't affect how you need to use every other word in a sentence.
The experience learning German is such a brutal and relatably confusing endeavour that Mark Twain actually wrote a book about it:
Right now this book is getting me through it because this shit is real:
I will say that I really appreciate that Germans just make new words by compounding existing words. It is amazing and terrifying to encounter 20+ letter words regularly. It's also really handy if you don't know the actual word. Example: I recently didn't know the word for feet so I said fleischschuhe (meat shoes). Really does the trick.
