Is German really that hard to learn? - Steve Kaufmann

Open Forum
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I may give my opinion from the perspective the other way round, so as a German who has learned English (to a somewhat useable extent). Note that this is highly subjective, though.

Personally I never considered English to be a difficult language, but I have been exposed to it from my early days on, especially through music and computer games. So I assume motivation plays a role here. What I noticed, though, is, that when it comes to vocabulary memorizing new words became easier when I grew older. This is for one part surely due to my already bigger vocabulary, increasing the chance that my brain could link a new word to an already known one (similar to how you get better at memorizing the 1∙1 the more of it you already know).

Another aspect imho is that due my academic education I came across a lot of rather academic vocabulary, which in German is usually of Latin origin. The same applies with all kind of technical terminology as well as computer related stuff (as mentioned, I am a gamer). So I would second that the similarity when it comes to germanic words probably isn’t that close, as even words of same origin have sometimes changed quiet a bit over time. But the common Latin word base appears rather big to me.

This might be a misinterpretation, though. After 30 years of dealing with the language it is probably hard to tell those things for sure. I most likely would have to go through my recent posts to really check how much of a percentage can be more or less transfered into German.

My perception is, though, that it is easier for a German to learn English than the other way round. For a German, when learning English I’d say the biggest hinderance is the rather irregular pronounciation. Even more considering that the language is spoken in different places in the world natively, and all of them have sort of their own English. Personally I find Japanese or Singaporean people easier to understand when they speak English than any native speaker. All L2 English speakers seem to speak more or less the same English, and all native speakers speak something else :smiley:

When learning German, the grammar train hits you really hard, me thinks. And it appears to me, that people don’t enjoy learning grammar overall. I mean, many are already confused if the word order is different. So maybe it is also a matter of attitude? :thinking:

Objectively, though, I don’t see why any language should be harder than another. At least among those used in the developed parts of the world. They all serve the same purpose. Of course, depending on who tries to learn which language. Strangely it seems that especially native English speakers tend to find German rather hard, despite the close relationship between those languages.

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i find german grammar more complicated than the romance languages overall but i think german verbs are slightly easier ,what can i say about steve kaufman he has his method that might not be for everybody which seems to favour flowing conversation without concern of grammatical knowledge or accuracy at times .

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After reading Steve’s resignation to imperfect grammar and the debate on difficulty, I must confess that I’ve made peace with German genders. My brain has apparently installed a random number generator for the articles. Sometimes it’s right, often it’s wrong.

But following others’ advice to just consume massive amounts of content has created a weird phenomenon. I now have emotional attachments to certain nouns. I feel that der Tisch (the table) is masculine. I’d be slightly offended if someone called it das Tisch. I have no rule to explain it… it’s just the ghost of a thousand sentences I’ve read.

So maybe the hard part isn’t diligently memorizing rules because trusting the process enough to let these fuzzy, statistically learned impressions form is at the end what is the most sustainable.

The grammar isn’t a wall to scale, otherwise we would be using the term learning grammar, not learning a language. it seems to me it’s more of like a landscape to wander through until it starts to feel familiar

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I’d like to add a comment as a German native speaker and teacher on lexical similarities. I think Obsttorte has mentioned it above, too.

One common issue for my students is that German differentiates Germanic and Latinate vocabulary a lot more than English does. A very common pattern is that where English uses a Latinate word (e.g. “to observe”), German primarily uses a Germanic one (“beobachten”). This can be obscured by the fact that a Latinate cognate exists (“observieren”), but it usually has a more specific, often technical, bureaucratic, scientific, or professional meaning (in the case of “observieren”, it means specifically keeping someone or something under observation for police investigations and the like). It’s not just a more formal synonym, but has a more specific meaning.

On the extreme side, the medical field works with an almost entirely doubled vocabulary, where just about every organ and every disease has a Germanic name used by the public and thus by patients, and has another, Latinate name used among medical profesionals. E.g. you might tell a patient he has Herz-Kreislauf-Krankheit (heart-circulation-disease) and tell your colleagues about the patient’s kardiovaskuläre Erkrankung. Or he reports Grippe, which you write down as Influenza, or he reports pain in his Brustkorb (chest basket), which you communicate to a colleague as Thorax, etc. Coming from English, the Latinate names are a breeze, but won’t help you with the general public at all.

(Another place where this tendency is often noted with humor are animal names. E.g. a Nashorn (nose-horn) is a rhinoceros, a Säugetier (suckling animal) is a mammal, and a Nilpferd (Nile horse) is a hippopotamus. Once again, experts will use the Latinate/Greek names in formal writing, and you will find them in the dictionary as cognates, but the everyday names are Germanic.)

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That’s exactly how I, and probably other native speakers, too, perceive it. If you have heard something in a certain way often enough, it just feels wrong if done differently.

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Wrong. The table Mr Kaufmann presented comes from Wikipedia, and the data in turn comes from Ethnologue. which uses a Swadish list of 100 words. It’s all there in the references and text. You can tell that the table is for a small list of words because the lexical similarity for English and French is 27%, exactly what one would expect as the most common English words are Germanic e.g. father, brother, bed, house, garden, bloom.

Another source:

Your imaginary 70% only exists in your head.

I’ve no idea what that means.

Mr Kaufmann’s video is about how hard it is for a native English speaker to learn German. The difficulty of an L2 depends on one’s L1(s), and of course any L2. You are a native Finnish speaker, therefore your experience is irrelevant to the question.

I’ve no idea what you are saying.

I’ve no idea what that means.

My Kaufmann’s video was about the difficulty of learning German for a native English speaker. Therefore my experience is relevant, along with the experience of other native English speakers, including of course Mr Kaufmann,

Wrong. There is no close mapping. The concepts represented by German prepositions are quite distinct from those represented by English ones.

Bei schönem Wetter sitzen wir → In nice weather we sit
Am Morgan → In the morning
Ich bin in der Schule → I am in the school
Das Gemälde ist an der Wand → The painting is on the wall. (1)
Er trägt den Sack auf dem Rücken. → He carries the sack on his back.

(1) Corrected following Obsttorte’s comment.

Wrong.

Because if you have an idea of the rough meaning of a word, you can develop an understanding of the deep meaning of a word by listening. That is what I did in French. If on the other hand the word has no clear mapping to an English word, or the mapping is cryptic, you cannot do that.

For a native English speaker, German requires a different approach to French. For example, if we know that Schuld means guilt, we can figure out that beschuldigen might mean to accuse, and entschuldigen might mean to remove guilt i.e. apologise. You cannot do that while listening, you have to sit down and figure it out.

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It is the same with English and French. English often has the French word, but it is used in a more technical or obscure sense. Thus a native English speaker with a good vocabulary has an advantage when learning French, but the French person does not have that advantage when learning English except when writing scientific documents for example. Thus we can say clear or limpid, watch or observe, show or demonstrate and so on.

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Minor correction here: Das Gemälde ist an der Wand.
It doesn’t neglect your point, though. There is indeed no 1-1 mapping in regards to prepositions between German and English (or any other language, I assume)

Interesting example, as entschuldigen could also be translated with excuse, which has the same stem as accuse.

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Thats probably a bit of the issue here. It would have been good to make this clear from the beginning, so in the title, too. It is, however, generally a bit odd that in a forum used by people from different places of the world learning all kind of different languages, such discussions are always made from a native English speakers perspective. Mr. Kaufmann could have made a video together with other polyglots (that are no native English speakers) so they can share their experiences, too.

For example, it appears to me that a lot of English speakers are having quiet some issues getting used to the different word order in Japanese or Korean, at least based on the comments I read every now and then (similar to the altering word order in german sub clauses). However, I never considered this an issue, maybe because I am German.

Opening up discussions as these that deal with an issue from one perspective only, especially always the same one, doesn’t appear to me as overly useful. Unless 90%+ of the community are native English speakers, in which case I am wrong, of course.

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I think these are actually both Latinate.

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Thank you, you are correct. I assumed clear had the same etymology as klar in German. Wikipedia has a list:

Interestingly the Germanic form is sometimes archaic, poetic or less often used, such as bloom, where we would usually use the latinate flower.

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Former German major here.

Steve’s perspective on how to get some practical use out of your language study is super-important. Enjoy reading, watching movies and video, and make sure you connect with real people using your language skills!

That said-- there is also a case for formal study and learning grammar.

If you are going to be giving presentations or talks, it is much easier to listen to someone who has a reasonable grasp of the grammar, phonlogy, and overall intonation.

If you need to function at work in a professional setting, write work materials, or sound like a polite, educated person, you’ll need some formal study in German.

For speaking, the first challenge is getting those separable verbs to come out at the end … and this takes practice and patience.

You can get usable German for reading, watching, and basic conversation with Steve’s methods. So if this is your goal, the vocabulary/comprehensible input approach will work.

If you want to take things further, I highly recommend the Goethe Institute courses for anyone interested in improving their German.

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A korean woman who uploaded some dictation videos on YouTube started learning German and uploaded a video with her speaking German after learning it for half a year or so. She attented a Goethe Institute in Korea, too. I was pretty impressed as I could actually understand every single word she said. She had a noteable accent, of course, but not to an extent that it harmed understanding.

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I would argue to a much smaller extent than going from English to German, as English uses its Latinate vocabulary a lot more in day-to-day speech – but yes, it’s the same phenomenon.

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I think what you stumbled into here is an early borrowing, in this case apparently from Old French. These are a rather fascinating phenomenon, they are Latinate words that were borrowed early enough to look Germanic by now, but are actually from Latin.

The one I remember blowing my mind back in school was “Ziegel” ([roof] tile), which is apparently from Latin tegula. It was borrowed all the way back in Proto-Germanic times, early enough to go through the High German consonant shift, giving it an affricate /ts/ instead of /t/. So it looks completely Germanic, but it’s technically Latinate.

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I don’t know what really to answer as your biggest problem seems to be that you don’t understand what lexical similarity means and instead use irrelevant statistics about english etymology. Etymology only gives etymology one way to that language whose etymology you are interested in. It doesn’t tell anything about lexical similarity to the other way, even to just one language, not to mention two at the same time. If you want to see what amount of french or german lexicon is related to english you have to look at their lexicon, not english. There are several reasons why the % might be different depending which language you look. Amount of words; obviously 30 000 words of 100 000 is different than 30 000 from 200 000. You are also probably very well aware that english has borrowed many of the french words twice or more so even the number shared might not be the same between languages. If you can’t see the similarities as well as others is one thing, but at least you should use relevant statistics rather than trying to use some completely unrelated statistic to try to justify your own feeling.

You are making big deal about small differences. Plus you are taking those times where they differ, not where they are used similarly. French uses words that are mostly unrelated.

So rough meaning is enough in french, but in german it isn’t? Big part of the french words have such a big difference to english meaning that you wouldn’t just pick them up while listening. Like regard as just one. It does help in learning, but it takes time and rewiring in your brain. But you need to read them, just like with those german examples. Those cases you have already something to latch on whereas with french you would often have words that are completely unrelated between them, usually some with no relation to english.

You still aren’t saying why? Just because SK speaks about learning german for native english speakers doesn’t mean it excludes those who are not native. In essence, I’m in a disadvantage because my native language isn’t in anyway related to german and only has small number of german loan words (some of which are also shared with english). At the same time my english level is close to native, even more so in terms of vocabulary. So there is now reason exclude me from the conversation. That’s not even that relevant. Question was about truthfully representing facts. If you have had trouble learning german fine. It just isn’t suported by facts that it is because german has less cognates than french. To me it seems it is just because of lack of time spent in the language. I’m sure french didn’t come as easily as you remember, but you spent time and effort to be able to pick out words from conversations. You have just forgot the effort you made. If you were to try to listen spanish or portuguese now you wouldn’t understand shit even if those are much closer to french (which you by now know so well that it helps a lot to learn the forementioned languages) than french and english. Time tends to make you forget troubles you have had.

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I imagine it is quite hard to learn english if you haven’t learned those basics in pronunciation when you were young. Ofcourse one can, but it takes some effort.

When it comes to different native accents, it seems many native speakers have trouble with accents that they aren’t used to. I remember one time one I was working in Australia and our boss had called in the hostel where we were staying. He had tried several minutes to tell my british workmates instructions for the next they, but eventually they asked me to the phone. It was just couple simple instructions and ok. To be fair, he had quite a strong accent and I was already used to the new zealand accent before which isn’t that different from australian accents. I also think it might be that they were monolinguals and weren’t used to trying to make effort in understanding something that they aren’t used to.

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Well, a big chunk if not the majority of music played at our radio stations is in English, and we tend to use english loanwords which we pronounce rather similar to how they are pronounced in English.

In regards to dialects: I don’t understand the majority of german dialects, too. However, most germans speak the standard variation with only a touch of their local dialect. So the pronounciation or intonation may differ slightly and they sometimes use different words or proverbs. But usually most of us can easely understand each other.

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It’s hard to know how to deal with this nonsense. I see no reason to repeat my earlier posts.

You still haven’t provided sources for your claims about lexical similarity. That is because they are false.

And yet you are the one who constantly talks about etymology.

And you continue to talk about etymology.

The table that Mr Kaufmann presents is for a list of 100 words, as indicated by the sources I linked to. You might also read some of the other posts in this thread from other forum members. You might learn something.

Evidently you know very little German.

By the way, Obsttorte is a native German speaker.

I said no such thing. You might try reading my posts before replying.

Actually most of the time the meanings in English and French are very similar, and the differences are easily picked up through input. That after all is how we learn the deep meaning.

Are you for real?

Feel free to give your subjective experiences as a native Finnish speaker, but don’t be so arrogant and rude as to tell a native English speaker that their subjective experiences are wrong, because they disagree with yours.

When we look at the sort of German spoken at a B1 and B2 level, we see that the language has far more non cognate words than French at that level. Thus ermutigen, benötigen, verlieren, verschieben, ernähren, nähen, verwenden, entscheiden, entsprechen, angreifen, lesen, vorschlagen, antragen, entschuldigen, verschweigene, beschuldigen, vorbereiten, zahlen, teilen, nehman, festnehman, kündigen, ankündigen, absagen, ablehnen, the list goes on and on. That is the real reason why my progress is slow compared to French.

Of course other people might have a different experience, especially if they find it easier to memorise words, or struggle more with the case system. And that was the message in my original post, that we don’t all have the same subjective experiences and difficulties when learning languages.

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fabbol: “I would argue to a much smaller extent than going from English to German, as English uses its Latinate vocabulary a lot more in day-to-day speech – but yes, it’s the same phenomenon.”

I’m sure you’re right, we do use quite a lot of latinate words in day to day English. In England, French is seen as a prestige language, we see them as sophisticated, and continue to borrow words. Often people drop French words into their speech to appear clever, even though equivalent English words exist. German does not have that image, although we do admire German engineering. I have no idea how the Germans see the French, or vice versa.

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