One of the struggles I had with German, as an English-speaker, was that I had to learn two things at once - German, and the structural and nomenclatural rules o

One of the struggles I had with German, as an English-speaker, was that I had to learn two things at once - German, and the structural and nomenclatural rules of grammar. German vocabulary isn't necessarily the most complicated, since there are so many common root-words with English, and most of the rest is more-or-less logically constructed as compounds of simpler words. This was probably the easier of the two subjects. However, much more difficult was learning the concept of different cases, genders, conjugations, subject-verb ordering rules, dependent and independent clauses, etc. In English, we just... don't really do that. I think I had done some super-basic sentence diagramming in English classes, but it was really not emphasised much, beyond the basics of "here's the subject, here's the verb, here's the object." Education about English grammar was woefully inadequate, bordering on non-existent, and without any background in Latin, the concepts of different cases, moods or tenses were, pardon the expression, Greek to me. So I was trying to both learn a foreign language, and the entire categorical system of language and grammar at the same time...