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The Awful German Language (1880)

(faculty.georgetown.edu)
186 points nalinidash | 3 comments | 16 May 25 04:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.497s | source
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ccppurcell ◴[16 May 25 08:23 UTC] No.44002994[source]▶
As someone who studied German at school and has made serious attempts to learn Finnish and Czech, I have feelings about this. Obviously Twain was being humourous. But I took three years of German two decades ago, and to this day it is easier than Czech (I'm embarrassed to say, as I've lived here and tried to learn on and off for the last six years). I'm exaggerating only a bit.
replies(1): >>44003204 #
1. trinix912 ◴[16 May 25 08:58 UTC] No.44003204[source]▶
The main difficulty with most Slavic languages are the grammatical cases/declensions/etc. German does have conjugations, but they have less forms and there are easily noticeable patterns (at least compared to something like Slovene: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovene_verbs#Full_conjugation...). The words might seem scary, but actually require less thinking to use in sentences.
replies(2): >>44006436 #>>44011536 #
2. ccppurcell ◴[16 May 25 15:10 UTC] No.44006436[source]▶
It's not so much the cases but the interaction with cases and gender. I found Finnish easier in some ways, despite the many cases. Because the case endings are always the same (modulo vowel harmony) so you can extract helpful information - something is inside something else say. In Czech a word ending with u has five different possible gender-case combinations (if I counted right) and that's not counting the distinction between short and long u.
3. stratocumulus0 ◴[17 May 25 02:15 UTC] No.44011536[source]▶
I'm a Polish speaker and have met some Polish learners in my life. Often I have no better advice than "you choose the conjugation patern based on how does the word feel to you".