The French language is full of irregularities and weird, complicated sentence constructions (try to negate something in a conditional past tense), and worst of all, so many flowers of speech, that francophones love to show off.
I also find spoken Spanish sentences much easier to parse.
For the record, I've put way, way more effort into French than I ever have into Spanish, including enough immersive higher-ed coursework that at one point I was dreaming in it pretty often.
[EDIT] I should add that my greatest annoyance with it is how hard it makes it to practice noun vocab in isolation, which is also kind of vital if you ever want to get past the problem. You can't just consistently practice the more general indefinite form because it's too often abbreviated ("l'au") so then when you go to make some damn adjective agree with it you're lost because you never actually learned the gender. Using the definite article fixes that problem but feels wrong, and never made the gender stick for me anyway. So you basically end up having to practice modifying them with adjectives to get good at nailing the gender every time. That's a fun friggin' Anki deck to put together. eyeroll
However, there's another rule that words beginning with an a use el because of the double vowel sound.
“Centurión” (roman military rank) and “esturión” (fish) are masculine
English* is definitely* a different* language* even if some words are about the same. I marked* those words with an asterisk* . German is much more different* and difficult*.
Computer language metaphor. If you know Ruby you can immediately understand Python but you discover you can't write Python as if it is Ruby. People would laugh at your scripts (and where are all those blocks? Easier the other way around.) You also think you can understand Elixir but this is not really the case. It is difficult to understand Erlang
But since German and English are both derived from the same parent language, we can find some similarity.
I am from India and ironically, I find learning Japanese easier than learning German/Spanish.
What German does though, is a declination of verbs through all cases and times, often irregular, accompanied by gendering pronouns which seems to be the hardest part of German for learner's with native tongue that hasn't these features.
The thing is, some think they got it after a few years, but we just let it slip, because it is not required, just feels wrong. We can tell, you've not grown up here.
Likewise I can tell that English is not your mother tongue.
I understood everything you wrote (you're obviously fluent), but tiny little things give away that English isn't your native language:
> learner's with native tongue that hasn't these features
I would have written: learners whose native tongue doesn't have these features
> but we just let it slip
but we just let it slide
> you've not grown up here
you didn't grow up here
I sincerely hope you don't take my comment the wrong way. It was too interesting to pass up an example of the very thing you mentioned: that you can tell even when the person is fluent (even if you don't hear an accent).
Related observation: You know how Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber[1], was caught? He used the expression "You can't eat your cake and have it, too."[2] But nearly everyone knows the expression as "You can't have your cake and eat it, too." Ted Kaczynski's brother recognized Ted's highly unusual usage from the anonymous manifesto published by the Unabomber, and this is what convinced him that he was the Unabomber.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski
[2] http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002762.h...
I sincerely believe that becoming perfect in a language requires a lot of daily hard work and actually living in a respective country. In fact, seeing my parents misusing the Portuguese language still with some very obvious bad habits, even after they lived and worked there for more than 12 years, almost only talking Portuguese, I think after a certain age it becomes incredibly difficult to acquire a foreign language to such a degree that you become indiscernible from a native speaker, at least for Average Joe.
My above post though... Very bad usage for which I can only blame myself and the early morning. And learning proper English on the Internet is close to impossible. How most Americans use English has become a gobbled mess to be honest (e.g. "irregardles", or "that was uncult for").
I've seen this with Spanish-speaking people. My wife was born and college educated in Mexico, has a Masters degree from here in the US as well. I've gleamed some insight from her. Many immigrants to this country, from all nations, don't know their native language. They can survive wherever they're from, but they don't really know Spanish or Cantonese etc, they'll use terms commonly used by the uneducated like "patas" for their feet (patas = paws in Spanish).
I can attest that there's no shortage of monolingual English-speakers who are no different, and don't really know their own language. They can survive here, but are barely educated enough to survive in the US. Some can't, and rely entirely on social programs to make it through life, a large part of the reason is general lack of education. Many Americans are entirely unemployable, and many are already "over-employed" and lucky to have jobs at all. You could easily be meeting up with those people online.
First of all, Spanish has a whole other problem, because there is no "official" Spanish AFAIK (even though people from Madrid claim that), compared to e.g. German and "Hochdeutsch". If you travel around Spain, just half a day from Madrid, even well educated, employable people will use words and constellations nobody would use in Madrid. And I think that is totally fine, people adapt to it. Considering the whole Latin American region and their variants, Spanish is a mess in this regard (they officially write words differently, using 'x' instead of 'j' in several occasions), but you can tell where somebody is from.
Regarding the deterioration of English: perfectly employable, smart, educated people in high paying jobs use "irregardless" (that missing 's' was my mistake), and it somehow made it into dictionaries, and it seems you think it is a word too. But think about it, does it make sense?
Why would you negate regardless and what does that construction mean?
Reminds me of when an Indian friend in high school played a prank on another friend by impersonating me through instant messages (we were sharing a hotel). My friend was able to figure out that it wasn't me because my Indian friend used the phrase "today morning" instead of "this morning."
Back then, we didn't have whatsapp, so we were texting. She never responded to texts during lecture before that day, so I was shocked.
Then, one message later, I realized that it was someone else using her phone and fifteen minutes later, I said, "If you are done, please give her phone back to XYZ"
He'd say "I order the fries" to the waiter.
What I meant was das Ma:dchen die fru:shtuck
It is not just remember the noun (apologies) but also the gender associated with the noun. To exacerbate the matter, there are millions of rules and then there are thousands of exceptions to those rules.
But then again, the language is intuitive :)
I just happened to love Japanese because I want to go to Japan soon and that's why I gave up German, but I will learn it in the next five years
Btw. it is "das Frühstück" as well.
But you get laughed at when saying "das Cola" in Germany, but yelled at being a stupid German when saying "die Cola" in Vienna. Which makes the whole thing great, because it obviously annoys us a lot, both is correct though, and it totally doesn't make a difference what the gender of the thing is :)
We have lot's of words where the "Duden", the official dictionary has an "Austrian also: ..." alternative gender. And then there are colloquial habits that are utterly out of spec which make me furious to be honest. Who the hell thinks "das Teller" sounds right?!
https://www.visitberlin.de/en/tempelhofer-feld-tempelhof-fie...
My second pet peeve is the various different (and unrelated) meaning of the word 'ihr', which can mean in turn you (plural pronoun), her (pronoun), her (possessive determiner, as in "her book") and their (determiner). Why in the world would you reuse the same word for so many different meanings?
My favorite thing about German is that things are pronounced as they are spelled and vice-versa.
"Incredibly stupid" sounds a little derogatory. They are not particularly necessary for understanding the language, the correct gender/article for certain nouns are even subject to heated debate between regional dialects, and I agree, if you are coming from a language without these rules it might be hard to grasp/integrate. Nevertheless, I would not go as far as to say they are incredibly stupid.
Consider, English also has he/she, him/her, his/hers. You just got rid off the "the"s, AFAIK (or German is the only Germanic language that adopted it from Latin, but I am no linguist).
But gender is the easier part, the cases make it difficult: Similar to the English "he/him", we have declination of articles: "einen/einem/eines". This seems terrible for English natives. Together with constructs of "den einen/dem einen/von einem/vom einen/zu einem/auf einen/auf einem", so you need to memorize ways of saying things and at the same time apply the case accordingly. It can make a huge difference in what you are trying to convey.
"Von einem ..." is "... of one" (indefinite article), where
"Vom einen ..." (Von dem einen) is "... of the one" (dem is the article, einen is actually a counting pronoun, not sure this is the right name).
Yeah, sorry about that, I just get a bit frustrated when I encounter languages with them, because they, for me, feel so unnecessary.
I don't feel that comparison is fair, and I consider the English a lot more intuitive, since it's an indication of the gender of a person, which has a gender, and not of an object, which doesn't. They are more similar to "er"/"es" or "seiner"/"ihrer" in my view.
My main gripe is that the gender is a needless extra burden when learning the language, and it doesn't even make sense some times (my go to example is "das Mädchen"). Luckily German is not as bad as french in that part, which even changes words themselves based on what gender you are talking to!
Careful throwing those stones!
Besides that, there's a huge difference, since plurals have clear cut rules, while object genders are only by memory with qualified guessing. That said I would welcome "2 dog", although Japanese has other problems with counters (e.g. "yonko", "yottsu", "yonki" etc), so not a very compelling argument to make...
After all these years, I've forgotten the genders of most nouns, and I'm very shaky on my declensions.
Same as in English: "All verbs are at the end? That doesn't have to be".
My trouble with German are that the same endings are overloaded and reused in different cases (I have no trouble with cases: English has cases too, and retains the nominative and genitive).
German is mostly consistent, but the endings to me are like operator overloading gone wild. The endungen like -e, -en, etc. overlap in so many cases. For instance -en is plural definite in all cases, but also also in dative/genitive definite cases, and indefinite masculine accusative, indefinite plural dative, and indefinite masc/neut genitive.
If you aren't fluent in German, it takes a bit of effort to disambiguate the endings, and to me it seems needlessly difficult. If only different endings were created to disambiguate.... (e.g. -et, -ew, -ep, etc.)
Die Möglichkeiten der deutschen Grammatik können einen, wenn man sich drauf, was man ruhig, wenn man möchte, sollte, einlässt, überraschen.
Which probably isn't exactly what it says, but it's good enough.
As I am an embarrassed English speaking monoglot, I can't wait for real-time speech-to-text-to-speech translation devices to become ubiquitous.
In the long run, though, these little differences are insignificant compared to the truly time-consuming part of learning a language: the vocabulary. French and Spanish are about equal in the difficulty of learning vocab.
English, is very difficult, I think, though obviously not as difficult as, say, Finnish.
Most languages have complexity somewhere. Chinese languages have Chinese ideographs. Japanese has Kanji (Chinese characters), two syllabic alphabets, romaji (Latin character set transliteration), and things like "counters" (alternate endings for counting words depending on what sort of thing you're counting -- there are over 1,000 different counters!).
The complexity in English mostly lies in all the borrowed words and the rather loose rules around the language (like French, the rules have lots of exceptions, though in French the exceptions to the rules are almost infuriating in number), the rather not-very-phonetic prononciation, the lack of stress marks, the large variation in accents.
Are you sure you're not mixing that up? Or are you talking about more irregular forms of the french subjunctive compared to the spanish counterpart?
French only uses present subjunctive (past subjunctive is very archaic) while Spanish uses both present and past. Also subjunctive is used in many more constructs in Spanish than in French.
French also doesn't use the simple past/preterite outside of literature, instead preferring the passé composé (constructed like the present perfect in English, but the meaning is that of the preterite). That's fortunate because the passé composé is a lot easier to conjugate. Spanish and Portuguese however do use the preterite even in the spoken language.
I wouldn't say that English is very difficult either, if only because of the extremely simple grammar. Pronunciation is messy however, I agree.
As for English, I think that there are fewer patterns for growing minds to hang onto than in Romance languages. But that's just a feeling born of my experience; I'm not entirely sure.
And romaji is not used much in Japan expect in print media just to look cool or something. Actual articles and posts never use romaji but instead a mix of kanji and kana mostly.
Romaji is also used on signs and other material aimed at foreigners -- Japanese people generally can read romaji because, after all, they are taught English in school. Romaji is not much of a cognitive burden, I agree, since it's very simple, goes along with English, and there's only one romanization.
Edit: I mean, French resembles English more than other languages.
It's true that the 100 or so most important words in English are still Germanic, and also that all European languages imported tens of thousands of rare, fancy, words from Greek, Latin and French. But I am talking about the middle-space, those few thousands of common-but-not-ubiquitous words that fill a student's vocab list.
In most Germanic languages that stuff is still largely Germanic, but in English it is much more mixed.
Seems to be vaguely upheld by Wiki although I can't find my original source
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_language_influences_in...
So while articles don't change much under declension, words like "a" and "the" are familiar to Germans but not to ancient Romans (I don't know about the French). Also the relative order of adjectives and nouns is Germanic. Conjugations, while simplified, still retain much of the old structure, and the set of tenses understood in English is quite Germanic.
Phonetically, French is quite different from English (equally stressed syllables, no diphthongs, nasalized vowels, unaspirated stops, uvular r).
The only problem with pronouncing German might be its ch (ç or x) and r (which varies with accent). It's also easier to work out how to pronounce a German word from its spelling.
Even in the written form it's absolutely impossible for me to decipher, it might as well be a completely different language:
>HWÆT, WE GAR-DEna in geardagum,
>þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon,
>hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon!
The language evolved so drastically over the past thousand years that his germanic roots are buried pretty deep. Nowadays you're likely to find more cognates in a french text than in a german one.
Meanwhile I can find french texts even older than Beowulf and still understand the general gist of it. See for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequence_of_Saint_Eulalia#Text . Even if you don't speak french comparing the original and modernized french version should be enough to convince you of the similarities:
>Buona pulcella fut eulalia. (Bonne pucelle fut Eulalie.)
>Bel auret corps bellezour anima (Beau avait le corps, belle l’âme.)
>Voldrent la veintre li deo Inimi. (Voulurent la vaincre les ennemis de Dieu)