I don’t hate German in any measure. I just hate Wienerisch!
It’s a pity that Robert isn’t still active at this forum - he would give you a verbal hiding for saying that! 
“Ein See” means “a sea”, “die See” refers to open waters/the ocean.
So yeah, these are different words.
I agree that the other two things are not that useful, though.^^
As I said “Well, they add variety and clarity to the language.” and stuff like “der gute Mann” vs. “ein guter Mann” falls into the “useless, but adds variety” category.
We seem to have different definitions of “clear” and “logical”, by the way.
I just wanted to offer a positive perspective…
@Force
People are naturally attracted to the things they love AND the things they hate.
I guess loving and hating German would be a good idea, haha. ^^
For whatever reason, I have these hate/love-feelings for the French language…and that makes it interesting. English on the other hand, is a “nice” language for me…I don´t love it…I don´t hate it…it´s just “that language that I use when I talk to foreigners”. xD
@ kimojima - I dare say, your experiment confused me a bit. Are you trying to say that people understand at least as well as they speak because they can understand everything that they can say?
@Paule
I guess that’s the weird thing about English - everyone has to learn it whether they want to or not?
(Well, I didn’t really have a choice either…actually…!)
@force
English classes are compulsory. You can choose to not pay attention, sure, but I imagine that not knowing English would suck xD
Speaking with tourists? Not possible…
Watching japanese movies and animes with english subtitles? Not possible…
Understanding “manager language”? Not possible…
Travelling to Poland, France or Skandinavia? Possible, but probably not enjoyable…
et cetera…
Don´t get me wrong. I like English, and I (used to) love with all of my heart…but I´m just used to it (I can not remember not knowing English) and it gets annoying, because it´s everywhere.
Even on a website like LingQ, most interesting discussions are in English…
It´s just not as exciting and exotic as French, Russian or Japanese anymore.
@topic
When I learned English at (in?) school, I was able to talk about virtually everything in English and so did most of my classmates. We might have had the infamous “Zey fink där zo oh-sim”-accent, I admit that, and we made a lot of grammatical mistakes (even though “Englischunterricht” seemed to mean "English grammar instruction) but we were able to talk about whatever we wanted to talk about.
That being said, none of us were able to understand “natural English”. So yeah…
@kimo
As I said, it is possible. ^^
Here´s my hypothesis…
If you almost completely focus on reading (without listening) and grammar (like we did at school) and then go to London, you´ll be able to ask for directions…but you won´t be able to understand the response. This actually happened to some of my classmates, who went to London: “Ah yeah, we were able say everything we needed to say… but we never understood the response”.
In this scenario, the problem is not your lack of speaking skills (he/she understood your question) but your lack of listening skills. I understand what you mean (if you say a word, you should understand it as well) but that´s probably not what Steve was talking about.
It might have been misleading to use “asking for directions” as an example, sorry for that.
As I mentioned before, they were able to talk about pretty much everything in a comprehensible way…but they were not able to understand pretty much everything that people said to them.
The same thing happened when I visited France last month after learning it for a year.
I was able to talk about pretty much everything…even topics like philosophy, politics and science, and people were able to understand exactly what I mean. The problem was, that a lot of times I didn´t understand what they were saying…
We can´t discuss whether or not it´s possible to be better at speaking, if we don´t agree what that means. So yeah:
“if people understand you…but you don´t understand them…you´re better at speaking.”
That´s my definition.
Your definition seems to be “if you use 1000 words actively, you can probably understand more than 1000 words passively” and I agree with that. Well, if understood you correctly.
I get that, don´t worry.^^
I´m just stating that (at least in my mind) it´s all about functionality.
I´m a functional speaker of French (people almost always understand me) but a non-functional “listener of French” , therefore, my speaking ability is better and therefore, I have to work on my listening comprehension.
If you disagree, that´s fine. I just hope that we can get out of this “I repeat my opinion, you repeat your opinion”-loop somehow. ^^
@kimo
I don´t mean offend you, but you´re constantly coming up with hilarious scenarios when you´re trying to prove a point. ^^
Kimojima,
In Korean I can say quite a few things, but have trouble understanding what people say back to me, even if much of it consists of words that I know. My wife has the same experience when speaking French. Thus we speak better than we understand.
We need to do a lot of listening (and reading and LingQing) in order to get to a situation where we understand better than we can speak, which is a more comfortable situation in my view.