←back to thread

The Awful German Language (1880)

(faculty.georgetown.edu)
186 points nalinidash | 2 comments | 16 May 25 04:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.418s | source
Show context
ayrtondesozzla ◴[16 May 25 10:42 UTC] No.44003765[source]▶
My experience couldn't be further from this. As an English-speaker natively, French was the alien language which took yonks to get, German was 1. oh, these 5 things are pronounced like that, now you can read anything with confidence and people know what word you mean when you talk, and 2. oh, here's maybe 15h worth of grammar to learn and now you can make sentences up to upper intermediate level, and they feel pretty intuitiive as soon as you start flipping verbs to the end sometimes. French was ten times the struggle!
replies(3): >>44003809 #>>44007298 #>>44007724 #
1. zahlman ◴[16 May 25 17:08 UTC] No.44007724[source]▶
Can confirm. 11 years of French education and 3 of German left me with considerably worse French.

(Given https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44001832, maybe it's because I learned French first?)

replies(1): >>44009074 #
2. yurishimo ◴[16 May 25 19:39 UTC] No.44009074[source]▶
How old were you when you first "learned" French? I've observed that kids/teenagers who aren't actually interested in learning the language retain just enough to pass their classes and then it all just drifts away. I was the same "learning" Spanish in high school in Texas.

Until I moved to a new country and _wanted_ to learn the language, I could barely remember how to ask where the toilet was. Now that I'm invested and interested, things are much more sticky.

I believe this is why much of the world has latched on to learning English. There is so much content available that people _want_ to consume, that it becomes a hobby they are actually interested in, rather than a chore. As more and more people learn English, it becomes a positive feedback loop of content creation that nearly the entire planet can participate in.