Is it easy to learn German compared to French and Spanish

[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]

ramblerambleramble

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]

German

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]

Native English Speaker who wants to learn French and german

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]

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!!