I can certainly confirm that learning German grammar as an adult is...challenging. Even though I am now fluent, learning as an adult means that you will always make mistakes on the gender of nouns. There are effectively four genders (male/neuter/female/plural), plus four cases (nominative/accusative/dative/genetive), so you have a 4x4 table giving you a choice of 16 articles that can appear in from of a noun. Only, the 16 articles are not unique: the table contains lots of duplicates in unexpected places.
Of course, most Western languages have gendered nouns - English is pretty unique in that respect. That likely comes from English being born as a pidgin of French and German.
Verbs in German are valuable things. You collect them, hold on to them as long as you can, and then - at the end of the sentence - they all come tumbling out. The order of the nouns at the end of the sentence differs by region. In purest German, they come out in reverse order, giving you a nice, context-free grammar. In Swiss dialects, they come out in the order they were conceived, meaning that the grammar is technically context sensitive. In Austrian dialects, the order can be a mix.
Of course, every language has its quirks. French, for example, puts extra letters on the ends of words that you are not supposed to pronounce. Well, unless the right two words are next to each other, in which case, you pronounce the letters after all.
English, meanwhile, gives learners fits, because the pronunciation has nothing whatsoever to do with spelling. Consider the letters "gh" in this sentence (thanks ChatGPT): "Though the tough man gave a sigh and a laugh at the ghost, he had a hiccough and coughed through the night by the slough, hoping to get enough rest."
Also, English has the 5 vowels of the Latin script representing some 25 vowels sounds, to the point that consonants can turn into vowels with no rhyme or reason. The best way to learn that English is nonsense is to live in Britain and learn local city and village names. They all have made up pronunciation rules, evolved over the centuries, sure, but they forgot to update the bloody name on the map to match the sounds.
As a descendant of the Romans, I can only shake my head at such barbarism.
Ha! And don’t even get me started with the Scots and their whiskey. Bruichladdich, Pittyvaich, and Tè Bheag? Bunnahabhain Stiuireadair? Auchroisk??
I swear they only do this to mess with people.
In these cases it's all Scottish Gaelic, which has a complex but very consistent phonics system. Complaining about it would be like complaining that Russian vodka brands are hard to pronounce because you can't read Cyrillic
So true. I always wondered why is Leicester pronounced as "lester" and not as "laichester".
Because the components are Leice-ster, not Lei-cester. Same for Glouce-ster, Worce-ster etc. A very refined pronunciation might emit both "s" sounds, but colloquially they get smooshed together into one.
Grenich anyone?
Soderk (Southwark), Marlibon (Marylebone), Reding (Reading), Bister (Bicester), Sozbery (Salisbury), Frum (Frome), Worick (Warwick), Noridge (Norwich), Darby (Derby), and the various Gloster, Lester, Wooster
Yeah but Greenwich is a place known world-wide, and I guess a high percentage of people mispronounce it (I was one of them).
It's known worldwide, but many people never heard an actual Britt pronouncing it.
In my country, it was always pronounced as green-each. Only in this thread I realised it's written Green-wich and pronounced gren-each.
And I'm pretty sure I'll forget it quickly and just keep calling it green-each.
... Hoyk (Hawick), Kircoodbree (Kirkcudbright), Mullguy (Milngavie), Cooriss (Culross), Geeree (Garioch), Eyela (Islay)
However, some Americans even have trouble with Glasgow (Glaz-go, not Glass-gow) and Edinburgh (Ed-in-burra, not Edin-bro)
Edinburgh is morr commonly pronounced “edinbruh”.
Glasgow and Edinburgh are pronounced "Glesca" and "Embra" by their natives but I wouldn't recommend it to others.
I've heard some Americans pronounce it "Edin-bo-ro" which is entirely off.
I know what you’re getting at when you say that English is a pidgin of German and French, but that’s kind of a distorted version of the truth.
First of all, it is not German, but Old English, which is not particularly more similar to German than it is to any other Germanic language e.g. Icelandic.
Second, the idea that middle/modern English began as a pidgin is a very fringe view in linguistics; the vast majority of people who have studied the question would instead say that it indeed has a huge amount of French (or more precisely, Norman) influence, but not to the extent that we can say it went through a pidgin/creolization process.
IIRC (not sure about this) English is thought to have lost its case system mainly due to influence from Old Norse (which had a similar case system but with different and not mutually intelligible endings), not French.
> First of all, it is not German, but Old English, which is not particularly more similar to German than it is to any other Germanic language e.g. Icelandic.
While English is changing relatively quickly, German isn't. Children today read original texts from the Gutenberg era in school without any trouble.
Where I grew up, we actually read some old english texts in school. It was hard, but certainly doable, using just our knowledge of modern German and English and the local dialects (north frisian and low german).
> we actually read some old english texts in school
How old? “Old English” is a term of art meaning the language exemplified e.g. by Beowulf or the writings of Aelfric, which I would be very impressed if you could read without special study, so perhaps you meant Middle English or Early Modern English.
As an example, the beginning of Beowulf reads: “Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.”
Middle English is the language of Chaucer and Early Modern English that of Shakespeare.
As a native English speaker (who can also read German at an intermediate level), I can read Shakespeare with some difficulty (relying on the copious footnotes that modern editions are peppered with), Chaucer with extreme difficulty, and Beowulf not at all.
> How old?
Well that's a good question I don't know the exact answer to. So I looked at the examples you provided.
Early Modern English:
Shakespeare's early modern English is something I can read fluently (and I know we read & acted his plays in original in school). To me that's basically the same as current English, just with slightly different vocabulary.
Middle English:
Original: "Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote" / Platt: "Wenn dat April, mit sien schuren sööte" / English: "When that April, with his showers sweet"
Original: "Inspired hath in every holt and heeth" / Platt: "Inspireert hett in elk Holt un Heid" / "Inspired has in every wood and heath"
That's probably the one we read in school. If you read it, it sounds like a grandparent combining mispronounced english and their dialect.
Old English:
Original: Cnut cyning gret his arcebiscopas and his leod-biscopas and Þurcyl eorl and ealle his eorlas and ealne his þeodscype, tƿelfhynde and tƿyhynde, gehadode and læƿede, on Englalande freondlice
Platt: Knut König greet sien Arzbischopes un sien Lüüd-Bischopes un Thorkell, jarl, un all sien jarls un all sin löödschaft, twalfhunnerte un tweehunnerte, widmete un laien, Engellande fründliche
English: Cnut, king, greets his archbishops and his people-bishops and Thorkell, earl, and all his earls and all his people ship, twelve hundred and two hundred, ordained and lay, in England friendly.
Now this one is much harder, especially as the spelling is getting even weirder, and the vocabulary includes a lot more danish words than middle English would, but pretty much every word exists in either modern English, or modern Low German.
> As a native English speaker (who can also read German at an intermediate level), I can read Shakespeare with some difficulty (relying on the copious footnotes that modern editions are peppered with), Chaucer with extreme difficulty, and Beowulf not at all.
The German dialects are clearly divided between Low German and High German, with different vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. Standard German is based on the vocabulary and grammar of High German, so it won't be very helpful.
The closest living relative to Old and Middle English would be North Frisian, but Low German as spoken in Anglia today is still relatively close (as shown above).
> English, meanwhile, gives learners fits, because the pronunciation has nothing whatsoever to do with spelling. Consider ...
the poem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chaos :)
As a native German speaker, I think it's fair to say that German is a comparatively poorly designed* language. It has too many needless concepts. I envy Chinese and Japanese; I feel like these languages have got it almost right. If they eliminated measure words, they'd probably be as perfect as a language can reasonably be.
* I know languages aren't "designed" for the most part, but I find it helpful to compare them as if they were.
Measure words in Chinese are great. They provide so much descriptive capacity in such a short simple way. 一棍棒, 一把棒, 一根盪, 一條棒, all would translate to English as "a stick", but they convey different perspectives about what that stick is. I can appreciate the frustration with learning words that only have one specific measure word that only really describes it, but even then you can honestly get away with 個.
> I envy Chinese and Japanese;
Up until the point you have to read and write them.
Especially written Japanese, which is a giant mess of stuff they borrowed from the west, china as well as native stuff.
At least with traditional Chinese, reading isn't as bad as people make it out to be. A lot of characters are pictophonetic characters(形聲), where one element describes the sound and the other meaning. While not perfect they allow a reader to guess with decent accuracy the meaning and pronunciation of a character they have never seen before.
I totally agree that learning German grammar as an adult is… demoralizing. Knowing, and accepting, that you will make a mistake every time that you open your mouth, hurts.
Also, the increase in possible permutations (and opportunities for mistakes) when you add adjective conjugations to the mix is daunting.
> I can certainly confirm that learning German grammar as an adult is...challenging.
Don't worry, only few German natives speakers are actually able to speak or write without grammar errors. Let's not even get started on spelling.
>You collect them, hold on to them as long as you can, and then - at the end of the sentence - they all come tumbling out.
as a German native I felt oddly at home with Japanese because funnily enough building seemingly endless verbs at the end of sentences felt very natural. Despite the fact that German, most of the time, is an ordinary SVO language. It's one of the mistakes English natives who just learn German make, that only made sense for me after I thought how odd that structure is.
I've also heard live TV translators really hate this about German because it's annoying, depending on the context, to have to wait to the end of a sentence to translate the whole thing.
Or the tale about a speaker, being translated into German. He tells a joke, the English speakers laugh. He says "ok, and seriously now...", the German speakers finally hear the verb and start to laugh.
> The order of the nouns at the end of the sentence differs by region.
Could you give some examples? As a German native speaker I have to admit I have no idea what you are talking about. :)
I think he meant verbs, and specifically how you say things like "could have done" - the order of "hätte machen können".
"Verbs in German are valuable things. You collect them, hold on to them as long as you can, and then - at the end of the sentence - they all come tumbling out."
Franz Kafka put this property to good use and sometimes keeps the reader in suspense for half a page or more until the sentence falls in place.
Swedish had some of this until the second world war, since then we've made it into an english-like pidgin.
> Of course, every language has its quirks. French, for example, puts extra letters on the ends of words that you are not supposed to pronounce. Well, unless the right two words are next to each other, in which case, you pronounce the letters after all.
A lot of this is to due with latin, which pronounciation evolved over time to give modern French but which origin is still kept in spelling. So it's not that the language "puts extra letters" it's that it kept old spelling when the pronunciation change.
An example: 'est' (to be, third person singular) is very obviously verbatim latin spelling but pronunciation has shifted so that the 't' is not pronounced (and arguably the 's' could go, too).
Sometimes there are useful "rules" about how spelling and pronunciations evolved, which can be useful for English speakers writing in French, too, to remember your accents:
hospital -> hôpital
hostel -> hôtel
castel (castle in English) -> château
The question is: why hasn't the spelling been updated.
In my native German spelling, while there are irregularities, has been updated over times. Sometimes out of habit, sometimes by "order."
There have been some minor French spelling reforms over the years but French people are affectionately proud of their language with all its quirks, and changing the spelling of basic vocabulary like “est” would be a bridge too far for them.
Well, the last big German spelling reform in 1996 also had been quite a culture war, where big newspapers resisted for a while, rejecting "Delfin" over "Delphin" or reducing usage of "ß" and using more "ss" depending on the previous vowel etc.
But over time most of the change have proven to be successful ...
And yes, the French "est" will remain for the time being, but for me as a student of French there would have been a lot of low hanging fruit.
But today the interesting thing to me is how modern communication changes this. Text messaging leads to a massive increase in "dialect writing" while at the same time auto correction (and more recently AI) counters that. Back in the days™ writing was mostly done by the elites (authors, news papers, authorities) and the private letter was well thought. But test messaging, online forums, ... lead to more text being generated by "average" public, which over time certainly impacts "professional" writing.
I think the fact that that reform was successful at all, even with resistance, is evidence that Germans have less of a nationalistic attachment to their language than French people do. Even the extremely common grammatical particle “daß” was changed (to “dass”) — it’s just impossible for me to imagine anything similar ever being accepted in France.
The thing is that reforms are not needed. Usually they are pushed under the argument of "simplification" by people who have arguably too much tome onbtheir hands but why is it needed and how far should you go?
It is not just spelling. There are periodic calls to simplify grammar for no other reason than apparently people get dumber and dumber over time and can't learn the language anymore so it should be simplified.
One example in France is reform to reduce the use of the subjunctive tense. For example, now when I read the news I see horrible stuff like "Après qu'ils ont" (instead of "Après qu'ils aient" [and btw "est" and "aient" are pronounced the same ;)]), which would have sent my primary school teacher into a rage. Why do that? Cynically just because the members of the Académie Française need to find something to do...
They also create a french version for every new word they include into their dictionary instead of taking the international version.
True, but for what it’s worth the rulings of the French Academy are usually widely ignored. You would be hard-pressed to find a French person who says “courriel” for e-mail.
Some of the French neologisms instead of English words are more popular in Quebec (but on the other hand, Quebecers also use a huge amount of English loanwords that French people don’t).
There is no such thing as an "international version" of words...
There is still no such thing as an "international version" of words... at most there are some loanwords that appear in several to many languages, which is what this Wikipedia article is about.