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I can certainly confirm that learning German grammar as an adult is...challenging. Even though I am now fluent, learning as an adult means that you will always

I can certainly confirm that learning German grammar as an adult is...challenging. Even though I am now fluent, learning as an adult means that you will always make mistakes on the gender of nouns. There are effectively four genders (male/neuter/female/plural), plus four cases (nominative/accusative/dative/genetive), so you have a 4x4 table giving you a choice of 16 articles that can appear in from of a noun. Only, the 16 articles are not unique: the table contains lots of duplicates in unexpected places. Of course, most Western languages have gendered nouns - English is pretty unique in that respect. That likely comes from English being born as a pidgin of French and German. Verbs in German are valuable things. You collect them, hold on to them as long as you can, and then - at the end of the sentence - they all come tumbling out. The order of the nouns at the end of the sentence differs by region. In purest German, they come out in reverse order, giving you a nice, context-free grammar. In Swiss dialects, they come out in the order they were conceived, meaning that the grammar is technically context sensitive. In Austrian dialects, the order can be a mix. Of course, every language has its quirks. French, for example, puts extra letters on the ends of words that you are not supposed to pronounce. Well, unless the right two words are next to each other, in which case, you pronounce the letters after all. English, meanwhile, gives learners fits, because the pronunciation has nothing whatsoever to do with spelling. Consider the letters "gh" in this sentence (thanks ChatGPT): "Though the tough man gave a sigh and a laugh at the ghost, he had a hiccough and coughed through the night by the slough, hoping to get enough rest."

codethief 1y ago
> The order of the nouns at the end of the sentence differs by region. Could you give some examples? As a German native speaker I have to admit I have no idea what you are talking about. :)
- ashdnazg 1y ago
  I think he meant verbs, and specifically how you say things like "could have done" - the order of "hätte machen können".
Barrin92 1y ago
>You collect them, hold on to them as long as you can, and then - at the end of the sentence - they all come tumbling out. as a German native I felt oddly at home with Japanese because funnily enough building seemingly endless verbs at the end of sentences felt very natural. Despite the fact that German, most of the time, is an ordinary SVO language. It's one of the mistakes English natives who just learn German make, that only made sense for me after I thought how odd that structure is. I've also heard live TV translators really hate this about German because it's annoying, depending on the context, to have to wait to the end of a sentence to translate the whole thing.
- bradley13 1y ago
  Or the tale about a speaker, being translated into German. He tells a joke, the English speakers laugh. He says "ok, and seriously now...", the German speakers finally hear the verb and start to laugh.
sph 1y ago
Also, English has the 5 vowels of the Latin script representing some 25 vowels sounds, to the point that consonants can turn into vowels with no rhyme or reason. The best way to learn that English is nonsense is to live in Britain and learn local city and village names. They all have made up pronunciation rules, evolved over the centuries, sure, but they forgot to update the bloody name on the map to match the sounds. As a descendant of the Romans, I can only shake my head at such barbarism.
- miroljub 1y ago
  So true. I always wondered why is Leicester pronounced as "lester" and not as "laichester".
  - darkwater 1y ago
    Grenich anyone?
    - sph 1y ago
      Soderk (Southwark), Marlibon (Marylebone), Reding (Reading), Bister (Bicester), Sozbery (Salisbury), Frum (Frome), Worick (Warwick), Noridge (Norwich), Darby (Derby), and the various Gloster, Lester, Wooster
      - darkwater 1y ago
        Yeah but Greenwich is a place known world-wide, and I guess a high percentage of people mispronounce it (I was one of them).
        miroljub 1y ago
        It's known worldwide, but many people never heard an actual Britt pronouncing it. In my country, it was always pronounced as green-each. Only in this thread I realised it's written Green-wich and pronounced gren-each. And I'm pretty sure I'll forget it quickly and just keep calling it green-each.
cess11 1y ago
"Verbs in German are valuable things. You collect them, hold on to them as long as you can, and then - at the end of the sentence - they all come tumbling out." Franz Kafka put this property to good use and sometimes keeps the reader in suspense for half a page or more until the sentence falls in place. Swedish had some of this until the second world war, since then we've made it into an english-like pidgin.
mytailorisrich 1y ago
> Of course, every language has its quirks. French, for example, puts extra letters on the ends of words that you are not supposed to pronounce. Well, unless the right two words are next to each other, in which case, you pronounce the letters after all. A lot of this is to due with latin, which pronounciation evolved over time to give modern French but which origin is still kept in spelling. So it's not that the language "puts extra letters" it's that it kept old spelling when the pronunciation change. An example: 'est' (to be, third person singular) is very obviously verbatim latin spelling but pronunciation has shifted so that the 't' is not pronounced (and arguably the 's' could go, too). Sometimes there are useful "rules" about how spelling and pronunciations evolved, which can be useful for English speakers writing in French, too, to remember your accents: hospital -> hôpital hostel -> hôtel castel (castle in English) -> château
- johannes1234321 1y ago
  The question is: why hasn't the spelling been updated. In my native German spelling, while there are irregularities, has been updated over times. Sometimes out of habit, sometimes by "order."
  - School-Cotton 1y ago
    There have been some minor French spelling reforms over the years but French people are affectionately proud of their language with all its quirks, and changing the spelling of basic vocabulary like “est” would be a bridge too far for them.
    - sharpshadow 1y ago
      They also create a french version for every new word they include into their dictionary instead of taking the international version.
      - School-Cotton 1y ago
        True, but for what it’s worth the rulings of the French Academy are usually widely ignored. You would be hard-pressed to find a French person who says “courriel” for e-mail. Some of the French neologisms instead of English words are more popular in Quebec (but on the other hand, Quebecers also use a huge amount of English loanwords that French people don’t).
School-Cotton 1y ago
I know what you’re getting at when you say that English is a pidgin of German and French, but that’s kind of a distorted version of the truth. First of all, it is not German, but Old English, which is not particularly more similar to German than it is to any other Germanic language e.g. Icelandic. Second, the idea that middle/modern English began as a pidgin is a very fringe view in linguistics; the vast majority of people who have studied the question would instead say that it indeed has a huge amount of French (or more precisely, Norman) influence, but not to the extent that we can say it went through a pidgin/creolization process. IIRC (not sure about this) English is thought to have lost its case system mainly due to influence from Old Norse (which had a similar case system but with different and not mutually intelligible endings), not French.
- kuschku 1y ago
  > First of all, it is not German, but Old English, which is not particularly more similar to German than it is to any other Germanic language e.g. Icelandic. While English is changing relatively quickly, German isn't. Children today read original texts from the Gutenberg era in school without any trouble. Where I grew up, we actually read some old english texts in school. It was hard, but certainly doable, using just our knowledge of modern German and English and the local dialects (north frisian and low german).
  - School-Cotton 1y ago
    > we actually read some old english texts in school How old? “Old English” is a term of art meaning the language exemplified e.g. by Beowulf or the writings of Aelfric, which I would be very impressed if you could read without special study, so perhaps you meant Middle English or Early Modern English. As an example, the beginning of Beowulf reads: “Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.” Middle English is the language of Chaucer and Early Modern English that of Shakespeare. As a native English speaker (who can also read German at an intermediate level), I can read Shakespeare with some difficulty (relying on the copious footnotes that modern editions are peppered with), Chaucer with extreme difficulty, and Beowulf not at all.
InsideOutSanta 1y ago
As a native German speaker, I think it's fair to say that German is a comparatively poorly designed* language. It has too many needless concepts. I envy Chinese and Japanese; I feel like these languages have got it almost right. If they eliminated measure words, they'd probably be as perfect as a language can reasonably be. * I know languages aren't "designed" for the most part, but I find it helpful to compare them as if they were.
- ur-whale 1y ago
  > I envy Chinese and Japanese; Up until the point you have to read and write them. Especially written Japanese, which is a giant mess of stuff they borrowed from the west, china as well as native stuff.
  - Benanov 1y ago
    Hangul fits Korean like a glove, at least.
  - euleriancon 1y ago
    At least with traditional Chinese, reading isn't as bad as people make it out to be. A lot of characters are pictophonetic characters(形聲), where one element describes the sound and the other meaning. While not perfect they allow a reader to guess with decent accuracy the meaning and pronunciation of a character they have never seen before.
- euleriancon 1y ago
  Measure words in Chinese are great. They provide so much descriptive capacity in such a short simple way. 一棍棒, 一把棒, 一根盪, 一條棒, all would translate to English as "a stick", but they convey different perspectives about what that stick is. I can appreciate the frustration with learning words that only have one specific measure word that only really describes it, but even then you can honestly get away with 個.
p00dles 1y ago
I totally agree that learning German grammar as an adult is… demoralizing. Knowing, and accepting, that you will make a mistake every time that you open your mouth, hurts. Also, the increase in possible permutations (and opportunities for mistakes) when you add adjective conjugations to the mix is daunting.
spacechild1 1y ago
> I can certainly confirm that learning German grammar as an adult is...challenging. Don't worry, only few German natives speakers are actually able to speak or write without grammar errors. Let's not even get started on spelling.
danadam 1y ago
> English, meanwhile, gives learners fits, because the pronunciation has nothing whatsoever to do with spelling. Consider ... the poem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chaos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chaos :)
0xBDB 1y ago
> Of course, most Western languages have gendered nouns - English is pretty unique in that respect. That likely comes from English being born as a pidgin of French and German. The John McWhorter theory (not sure if it's generally accepted, but he seems to have evidence that it happened in the right part of England at the right time) is that it comes from Viking-era Danish settlers learning Anglo-Saxon. Similar languages, but different enough that adult learners dumped out all the complications they could.

codethief 1y ago

> The order of the nouns at the end of the sentence differs by region. Could you give some examples? As a German native speaker I have to admit I have no idea what you are talking about. :)

ashdnazg 1y ago
I think he meant verbs, and specifically how you say things like "could have done" - the order of "hätte machen können".

Barrin92 1y ago

>You collect them, hold on to them as long as you can, and then - at the end of the sentence - they all come tumbling out. as a German native I felt oddly at home with Japanese because funnily enough building seemingly endless verbs at the end of sentences felt very natural. Despite the fact that German, most of the time, is an ordinary SVO language. It's one of the mistakes English natives who just learn German make, that only made sense for me after I thought how odd that structure is. I've also heard live TV translators really hate this about German because it's annoying, depending on the context, to have to wait to the end of a sentence to translate the whole thing.

bradley13 1y ago
Or the tale about a speaker, being translated into German. He tells a joke, the English speakers laugh. He says "ok, and seriously now...", the German speakers finally hear the verb and start to laugh.

sph 1y ago

Also, English has the 5 vowels of the Latin script representing some 25 vowels sounds, to the point that consonants can turn into vowels with no rhyme or reason. The best way to learn that English is nonsense is to live in Britain and learn local city and village names. They all have made up pronunciation rules, evolved over the centuries, sure, but they forgot to update the bloody name on the map to match the sounds. As a descendant of the Romans, I can only shake my head at such barbarism.

miroljub 1y ago
So true. I always wondered why is Leicester pronounced as "lester" and not as "laichester".
- darkwater 1y ago
  Grenich anyone?
  - sph 1y ago
    Soderk (Southwark), Marlibon (Marylebone), Reding (Reading), Bister (Bicester), Sozbery (Salisbury), Frum (Frome), Worick (Warwick), Noridge (Norwich), Darby (Derby), and the various Gloster, Lester, Wooster
    - darkwater 1y ago
      Yeah but Greenwich is a place known world-wide, and I guess a high percentage of people mispronounce it (I was one of them).
      - miroljub 1y ago
        It's known worldwide, but many people never heard an actual Britt pronouncing it. In my country, it was always pronounced as green-each. Only in this thread I realised it's written Green-wich and pronounced gren-each. And I'm pretty sure I'll forget it quickly and just keep calling it green-each.

cess11 1y ago

"Verbs in German are valuable things. You collect them, hold on to them as long as you can, and then - at the end of the sentence - they all come tumbling out." Franz Kafka put this property to good use and sometimes keeps the reader in suspense for half a page or more until the sentence falls in place. Swedish had some of this until the second world war, since then we've made it into an english-like pidgin.

mytailorisrich 1y ago

> Of course, every language has its quirks. French, for example, puts extra letters on the ends of words that you are not supposed to pronounce. Well, unless the right two words are next to each other, in which case, you pronounce the letters after all. A lot of this is to due with latin, which pronounciation evolved over time to give modern French but which origin is still kept in spelling. So it's not that the language "puts extra letters" it's that it kept old spelling when the pronunciation change. An example: 'est' (to be, third person singular) is very obviously verbatim latin spelling but pronunciation has shifted so that the 't' is not pronounced (and arguably the 's' could go, too). Sometimes there are useful "rules" about how spelling and pronunciations evolved, which can be useful for English speakers writing in French, too, to remember your accents: hospital -> hôpital hostel -> hôtel castel (castle in English) -> château

johannes1234321 1y ago
The question is: why hasn't the spelling been updated. In my native German spelling, while there are irregularities, has been updated over times. Sometimes out of habit, sometimes by "order."
- School-Cotton 1y ago
  There have been some minor French spelling reforms over the years but French people are affectionately proud of their language with all its quirks, and changing the spelling of basic vocabulary like “est” would be a bridge too far for them.
  - sharpshadow 1y ago
    They also create a french version for every new word they include into their dictionary instead of taking the international version.
    - School-Cotton 1y ago
      True, but for what it’s worth the rulings of the French Academy are usually widely ignored. You would be hard-pressed to find a French person who says “courriel” for e-mail. Some of the French neologisms instead of English words are more popular in Quebec (but on the other hand, Quebecers also use a huge amount of English loanwords that French people don’t).

School-Cotton 1y ago

I know what you’re getting at when you say that English is a pidgin of German and French, but that’s kind of a distorted version of the truth. First of all, it is not German, but Old English, which is not particularly more similar to German than it is to any other Germanic language e.g. Icelandic. Second, the idea that middle/modern English began as a pidgin is a very fringe view in linguistics; the vast majority of people who have studied the question would instead say that it indeed has a huge amount of French (or more precisely, Norman) influence, but not to the extent that we can say it went through a pidgin/creolization process. IIRC (not sure about this) English is thought to have lost its case system mainly due to influence from Old Norse (which had a similar case system but with different and not mutually intelligible endings), not French.

kuschku 1y ago
> First of all, it is not German, but Old English, which is not particularly more similar to German than it is to any other Germanic language e.g. Icelandic. While English is changing relatively quickly, German isn't. Children today read original texts from the Gutenberg era in school without any trouble. Where I grew up, we actually read some old english texts in school. It was hard, but certainly doable, using just our knowledge of modern German and English and the local dialects (north frisian and low german).
- School-Cotton 1y ago
  > we actually read some old english texts in school How old? “Old English” is a term of art meaning the language exemplified e.g. by Beowulf or the writings of Aelfric, which I would be very impressed if you could read without special study, so perhaps you meant Middle English or Early Modern English. As an example, the beginning of Beowulf reads: “Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.” Middle English is the language of Chaucer and Early Modern English that of Shakespeare. As a native English speaker (who can also read German at an intermediate level), I can read Shakespeare with some difficulty (relying on the copious footnotes that modern editions are peppered with), Chaucer with extreme difficulty, and Beowulf not at all.

InsideOutSanta 1y ago

As a native German speaker, I think it's fair to say that German is a comparatively poorly designed* language. It has too many needless concepts. I envy Chinese and Japanese; I feel like these languages have got it almost right. If they eliminated measure words, they'd probably be as perfect as a language can reasonably be. * I know languages aren't "designed" for the most part, but I find it helpful to compare them as if they were.

ur-whale 1y ago
> I envy Chinese and Japanese; Up until the point you have to read and write them. Especially written Japanese, which is a giant mess of stuff they borrowed from the west, china as well as native stuff.
- Benanov 1y ago
  Hangul fits Korean like a glove, at least.
- euleriancon 1y ago
  At least with traditional Chinese, reading isn't as bad as people make it out to be. A lot of characters are pictophonetic characters(形聲), where one element describes the sound and the other meaning. While not perfect they allow a reader to guess with decent accuracy the meaning and pronunciation of a character they have never seen before.
euleriancon 1y ago
Measure words in Chinese are great. They provide so much descriptive capacity in such a short simple way. 一棍棒, 一把棒, 一根盪, 一條棒, all would translate to English as "a stick", but they convey different perspectives about what that stick is. I can appreciate the frustration with learning words that only have one specific measure word that only really describes it, but even then you can honestly get away with 個.

p00dles 1y ago

I totally agree that learning German grammar as an adult is… demoralizing. Knowing, and accepting, that you will make a mistake every time that you open your mouth, hurts. Also, the increase in possible permutations (and opportunities for mistakes) when you add adjective conjugations to the mix is daunting.

spacechild1 1y ago

> I can certainly confirm that learning German grammar as an adult is...challenging. Don't worry, only few German natives speakers are actually able to speak or write without grammar errors. Let's not even get started on spelling.

danadam 1y ago

> English, meanwhile, gives learners fits, because the pronunciation has nothing whatsoever to do with spelling. Consider ... the poem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chaos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chaos :)

0xBDB 1y ago

> Of course, most Western languages have gendered nouns - English is pretty unique in that respect. That likely comes from English being born as a pidgin of French and German. The John McWhorter theory (not sure if it's generally accepted, but he seems to have evidence that it happened in the right part of England at the right time) is that it comes from Viking-era Danish settlers learning Anglo-Saxon. Similar languages, but different enough that adult learners dumped out all the complications they could.