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Something I discovered recently is that learning a second language is hard and takes a lot of work. I moved to Germany 3 years ago thinking I would just kind of
by cluoma 9y ago
Something I discovered recently is that learning a second language is hard and takes a lot of work. I moved to Germany 3 years ago thinking I would just kind of pick it up as I go. Well, that didn't really happen. So now I am spending 3 of my evenings per week learning German after work.
- thg 9y agoI take that you've never heard of Mark Twain's "The Awful German Language"[0]? My favorite quote is "My philological studies have satisfied me that a gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years. It seems manifest, then, that the latter tongue ought to be trimmed down and repaired. If it is to remain as it is, it ought to be gently and reverently set aside among the dead languages, for only the dead have time to learn it." Although, as a native speaker I can't comment on whether that's actually accurate. [0]: https://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html https://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- peoplewindow 9y agoGerman definitely is difficult in some respects for an English speaker. English grammar has simplified over time in ways that German has not. For instance English used to have a distinction between formal and informal you (thou and ye), centuries ago but that long since passed into disuse. Nowadays there is only one form of "you". Likewise, the English of the 11th century had the Germanic three genders: male, female and neutral. However Old English would be unintelligible to a modern speaker. Gender was gone by the 1300's. All these things cause tremendous problems for learning the language because you have to track distinctions in the language that don't exist natively so you never had to think about before. Native speakers learn genders just by hearing them repeatedly, at the same time as learning the words, but English speakers learning German normally need to study dictionaries a lot to learn new words and as such genders often get lost or muddled along the way. One thing that has often intrigued me and which I never saw an explanation for is why older languages often have more elaborate and complex grammar than modern languages, and why English has simplified over time more than others. German seems to have hardly simplified at all outside of the forced spelling reform. The simplification of English grammar has been continual and is ongoing today - we're in the middle of losing the distinction between "less" and "fewer" for example, and "whom" is virtually dead. Presumably there's a grammatical limit somewhere, and presumably very old languages were simpler than medieval languages. But Latin is often held up as the archetype of crisp, consistent yet complex grammar and that's thousands of years old.
- thg 9y ago> One thing that has often intrigued me and which I never saw an explanation for is why older languages often have more elaborate and complex grammar than modern languages, and why English has simplified over time more than others. I can recommend the book The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention on that subject. It really can't be answered in a short summary.
- Udo_Schmitz 9y agoI love that essay. But at least German pronunciation is more regular than English: “Dearest creature in creation, Study English pronunciation. I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.” https://www.learnenglish.de/pronunciation/pronunciationpoem.html https://www.learnenglish.de/pronunciation/pronunciationpoem....