Is it easy to learn German compared to French and Spanish

[Triton4]

For one who speaks only English?

Is it practical to learn German (i.e. will it be of help in the current world)?

[Nico1980]

I guess spanish is easier than German...

[NJK]

Originally posted by Nico1980
I guess spanish is easier than German...

depends on your native language

since i speak frisian for me German is far easier to learn than spanish
German and Frisian are close related languages.

[Nico1980]

Frisian? Im curios... where does people speack Frisian? I never heard about it (my ignorance, i know) but sound interesting to learn something new today. If you are so kind and explain me about Frisian. Thanks.

[NJK]

www.google.com
keyword frysian or fryslan

enough info to keep you busy for some time

[Nico1980]

Originally posted by spaceplay
www.google.com
keyword frysian or fryslan

enough info to keep you busy for some time

Google said:

Did you mean: friesian



Neederland?

------

Ok, found something.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friesland

"As milk is to cheese, are English and Frise."

"Bûter, brea, en griene tsiis; wa't dat net sizze kin, is gjin oprjochte Fries", which in English reads: "Butter, bread and green cheese, whoever can't say that is no real Frise".

[Koopa]

Learning German is hard, because our languages is complicated. But it was much easier for me to learn English then French. I have problems to talk french and french is very hard to learn at least for German people.

So I agree, it depends on your native language, if it's hard or not.

[Nico1980]

Originally posted by Koopatrooper
Learning German is hard, because our languages is complicated. But it was much easier for me to learn English then French. I have problems to talk french and french is very hard to learn at least for German people.

So I agree, it depends on your native language, if it's hard or not.

Agree, i speak spanish and for me French, Italisn and Portuguese are much easier than german

[imike24]

yes I agreed. I tried learning German but it was just not easy as I have thought. I had master numerous language for years but I met my match with German. Anyway it will require some time to master it but perseverance will pay off. I will keep trying.

__________________
*******y philadelphia *******y seattle *******y washingtondc *******y st louis

[Nico1980]

German is parented with english and spanichs is parented with Italian, French, portugues, Latin, etc.

[steep5]

I do not mean to sound like a snob, but I thought I would point out the (apparently not so) obvious; English is a Germanic language. That explains the numerous amount of cognitives between the languages–including the word "Kognativ".

In my opinion, German should be the easiest language for a native English speaker to learn.

In the USA, it makes more sense to learn Spanish. Don't count German out, however; if you wish to go into international business, German is still a very useful language!

[Fuchur84]

In my opinion, German should be the easiest language for a native English speaker to learn.

It depends. The biggest problem people have with German are the cases. we got "only" 4 of them (there are other languages which have 16... I think finnish is one of them).
In English there is no such thing. That is why English is considered by other Western countries as a more or less easy language.

Cases depend on the sentence itself and the position of the word in the sentence.
In the end, most people will understand what you are after anyway even so you dont get the right case. (It is not like that we would always be right with this neighter ).

As in French or Spanish we use different female and male articles (that means we dont have one word like "the" but we use three different once for male, female and words which describe an "it"). That is the reason why sometimes you will read something like "The apple who is..." and not "The apple which is...". An apple ("Der Apfel") is a "male-word" in German. The Sun ("die Sonne") is a "female-word". The car ("das Auto") is the "it"-word.

A thing that is a bit different to other languages is, that German is "case-sensitive" if you write it. All nouns are written in Uppercase (better to say the first letter of it is written in uppercase -> "Apfel"). In English and many other languages this is only the case if you write a name. "Susi eats an apple" = "Susi ist einen Apfel."

So I would say that German is slightly (not very much) more difficult to learn than Spanish. (I cant speak French so I cant say much about it, but it is considered to be as difficult as Spanish so I assume that for now.)

In Europe it is the most spoken language (mothertongue-wise). That is because it is spoken in Germany, Austria and Switzerland as mothertongue-language.
You will find the language itself on the whole planet, but here is a map of where it is spoken in Europe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:K...man_EU_map.png

In Europe it is mainly important because Germany is one of or the most important economic country here.

German is although known in the USA, because the German pilgrins in the USA are based in Philadelphia and as that, you can find most of the german-speaking people in the area around Philadelphia.

"Is German more important than Spanish of French"? I would say no. It is important because of the economic power of Germany, but more people talk spanish or french all over the planet than German.
However Spanish is spoken in many areas which are not that powerful in a economic way. (Some countries in South-America, Spain, etc.)
However French is often spoken in although economical powerful countries like Japan because it is considered as a very "beautiful" language.

Someone told you to learn Chinese. It is true that it will become more and more important but it is although true that it is totally different from languages in the western world because of different letters, a whole other pronounciation and the fact that there is not "one" Chinese-language.

The one which is spoken by most people is "Mandarin".
But it can happen to you that you are in a part of China, where they just dont speak it.
For example in Germany there are different dialects but everybody will understand what you are saying if you speak German to them. In China there are really different languages which are spoken, not only different dialects.

I would recommend to learn one of the other western languages (like German, Spanish or French) and not to try to learn a eastern lanuage like Chinese. This is just to difficult and you will very fast hit a point where you lost all your motivation.
On the other hand: IF you can speak an eastern an a western language, you are more unique.
It is your choice.

Many more informations can be found on wikipedia.

*Fuchur*LINK TO IMAGE

[_bullet_time_99]

For me Spanish and French are far more easy to learn than German. I know a bit of all these languages and German seems the hardest. I think that only Chinese is harder...

[VIPer]

Russian is probably one of the harder European languages.

[Menschenfleisch]

Originally posted by Fuchur84
"Susi eats an apple" = "Susi ist einen Apfel.

It means "Susi isst einen Apfel." Because "ist" would mean "is" not "eat"

We germans also have the letters ä, ö, ü and ß

And I agree with Koopatrooper 100%

French is also for me very very hard to learn ...

and english the easiest

[Mach13]

For me Spanish and French are far more easy to learn than German

[LanguageTravel]

I think Russian is easier to learn than German. It has a certain logic in the "grammatical-gender". German words have to be learned by heart to know that aspect.
BTW, here here you can find a quite comprehensive online German grammar trainer (deutschakademie[dot]de/online-deutschkurs).

According to the page it disposes of more than 20.000 exercises sortable by most common German textbooks and grammar topics. Furthermore it features a help function, which lets you contact a GLF teacher for exercise specific support. It may take a day or so to get support by e-mail, but the service is for free.

[Languageexplore]

Learning German pronunciation etc. wasn't a problem for myself (lived in Germany for a year). But the German grammar is just so much more complex compared to Spanish i would say Spanish is easier to pick up if you're native tongue is English.

Just my humble opinion of course

[An1MuS]

I agree. People that speak latin-based languages like Portuguese, Spanish, French and Italian, learn each other much more easily than other Germanic, like English and German, because they have similarities, which make it easier to learn.

For instance, both in Portuguese and French the structure of the sentences is exactly the same and many words are similar. "Eu vou comer/manjar" "Je vais manjer" or spanish, "yo voy a comer" While english sounds nothing at all similar "I'm going to eat" The closer the country the more similar, that's why italian is the most different from Portuguese and Spanish the most similar, and French is in the middle.

[Grimmjow JJ]

English is my first language and French is my second, and now I'm taking German, and I find it immensely easy. I'd like to learn Spanish, Japanese, and Russian as well, but one step at a time... I actually think German and English sound a lot alike, and even look a lot alike, there are just different rules. For example, the 'die/der/das/die' instead of 'the'. That's obnoxious. I believe in Spanish there is 'el/la/los/las', and in French there is 'le/la/les' (all for articles, ramble ramble ramble). Japanese is so complicated-sounding. I don't like to drop my pronouns either. ARGH! And I want a future tense! RAWR!

English: I eat the hamburger in the dining room.
German: Ich esse den Hamburger im Esszimmer.

der becomes den in the akkusativ, im is in dem, dem is for das/der.

It seems complicated, but is easy to memorize.

(French: Je mange l'hamburger dans la salle à manger.

In comparison, I think German is easier for English-speakers because German accents, in general, are easier to understand. I've been taking French for four years and can barely understand the accents sometimes. Accents as in how someone speaks it, not é ç è ê à, etc. Learning the language can also depend on the teacher, and your own ability to learn languages. I have a very good German teacher, and I'm fairly good at learning languages, so my opinion might not be very helpful at all.

[Koopa]

Well, German has a lot of grammatic rules, which simply make no sense for non native German speakers.

Starting with the articles. For many it's not clear, why a tree is male (der Baum), a machine femal (die Maschine) or a child it neuter (das Kind).

Also you only showed a very simple example, but what about more difficult time forms:

Ich esse den Hamburger im Esszimmer.
Ich habe den Hamburger im Esszimmer gegessen.
Ich aß den Hamburger im Esszimmer.
Ich werde den Hamburger im Esszimmer essen.
Bis 12:00 Uhr werde ich den Hamburger im Esszimmer gegessen haben.

There are other things, which are more complicated.

[rockouthippie]

rman has a lot of grammatic rules, which simply make no sense for non native German speakers.

Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz! I'm guessing it doesn't make much sense to Germans either.

[Koopa]

Well, it makes sense - a bit at least, but doubtful, that we have such law here, hehe.

[rockouthippie]

Is that the sound you make when you get mad cow? My ex used to say stuff like that when she mixed scotch with champagne.

[karder52]

i know towards the end of wwII american soldiers would sprinkle in german sounds and pronunciations and the germans would understand what the americans would want...ive been lookin through german dictionaries online and im understanding those words a lot more than spanish words, i may not say them right but i understand them for instance the mexican-spanish word for grizzly bear is oso pardo where the german word for grizzly bear is grislibar (spelled with letters from the german alphabet). i could look at grislibar and make a better guess as to what it is than i can for oso pardo.

i also agree with everyone in saying that motivation makes the most difference followed by your individual backround with language.

[clcheapshoes520]

so hard to learn

[cailing0322]

German in Germany, Austria, the official language. It belongs under the Indo-European language family under the West German Germanic. The formation of a common standard German language can be traced back to Martin Luther (the Bible translation. German is 1 million people use language. First in Germany (Austria, Switzerland, northern, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Italy Nantiluoer, Belgium, a small parts of the region and some parts of Poland, the use of the Alsace region of France. the Soviet Union and Romania's German immigrant areas, and the United States, Pennsylvania, also have a few in German.

[bef]

I am a German Franconian and i don`t understand why everybody say that French is more difficult than German. The only thing that is difficult in French is the conjugation. But beside of that, it`s easy to learn French. I mean English is definitly the most easy language. But French is not far away from that. For me of course German is the easiest, but when i think about my language, i would say for a foreigner it has to be very hard and strange: cause of 3 articles and not a concrete sentence writing: in englisch subject-verb-object. in german sometimes s-o-v. also what is strange is that sometimes the article die(female) is der(male): die frau sagt
ich sagte der frau
lol
happy german learning

[dedalus33]

I always thought German would be easier since English is Germanic but my dad says French would be. How much time do you think it would take to learn french and btw, i have an elementary knowledge of French already as i took it for three years in school but didn't take it seriously cause i was a teenager. But now I want to visit both France and Germany and be able to go outside of the tourist areas and obviously i think it would be rude to not have at least a cursory knowledge of the language so people who don't speak English know what i am saying and if they do at least they know that i made a good effort to speak their language and usually people would respond well to it especially since most Americans don't even try.

[daisyau]

Originally Posted by Triton4

For one who speaks only English?

Is it practical to learn German (i.e. will it be of help in the current world)?

I guess for an English it easier to learn Spanish..as in Italian, you read as you write. French English and German don't have they same pronunciation as you write and sometimes Germans write 3 words in a word so quite compicated.
You should start with Spanish (as an Italian opinion) then Italian and French will be easier.
german is not impossible but u must be into it!!

[daisyau]

Originally Posted by DollyVickroyz

@OP: hey, thanks. Nice topic, i have been searching these info for ages.

really? and where have you been before? because you can find such infos since 2000, on internet

[Hartmann78]

Originally Posted by Triton4

For one who speaks only English?

Is it practical to learn German (i.e. will it be of help in the current world)?

I think you probably will be a lot better of if you learn spanish. No only is it supposed to be easier but more people speak it around the world.

[Gesho]

I think that the difficulty is as follows:
-German
-French
-Spanish
-English (the easiest).

Of course it depends what is your Native language, as well.

[jambotrat]

Originally Posted by steep5

I do not mean to sound like a snob, but I thought I would point out the (apparently not so) obvious; English is a Germanic language. That explains the numerous amount of cognitives between the languages–including the word "Kognativ".

In my opinion, German should be the easiest language for a native English speaker to learn.

In the USA, it makes more sense to learn Spanish. Don't count German out, however; if you wish to go into international business, German is still a very useful language!

I do not mean to sound like a snob, but I think you will find that German and English share 'cognate' not because English is a Germanic language but because the cultural histories of both Great Britain and Germany owe a great deal to classical civilizations and, therefore, Latin.

[alwleedk]

German is parented with english and spanichs is parented with Italian, French, portugues, Latin, etc.

[normaali]

According to the page it disposes of more than 20.000 exercises sortable by most common German textbooks and grammar topics. Furthermore it features a help function, which lets you contact a GLF teacher for exercise specific support wrdshan. It may take a day or so to get support by e-mail, but the service is for free.

[liza]

If you speak English..German should not be so difficult. Some english words were actually borrowed from the language like Kindergarten. And some words are the same like Stress, Confllict..but written with a K. etc My husband is half German..we lived in Bavaria for a year, just to give our baby a platform to learn the language, then we moved back, but now my child speaks almost fluent German..and me well?..naja, es geht, aber Perfekt ist es nicht!. Try it.

[droidafrica]

In my opinion, I don't think any language is specifically easy or difficult to learn. But the learner's interest is the determining factor.

[NurLutix]

Luckily, I'm from Germany.