[merb]

> It is possible to learn German but it requires huge effort and dedication and not many people are capable of that.

Actually I'm german and I think to learn every bits of our language takes a huge effort. I mean we maybe don't have so many Characters like the Chinese ones. But our huge rules of grammar and special word cases makes it ridicoulus. And then there is the "Neue deutsche Rechtschreibung", which of course some things were reversed in the last years.

Basically when just ignoring all those stuff you are probably understood by the most people here even if they will likely try to correct you but I guess except a few there aren't much people that really know how to correctly use the language as a whole.

[rb2k_]

> But our huge rules of grammar and special word cases makes it ridicoulus

I'm German but living in the US for the last few years. I've had American friends in Germany and from what I understand, most things are pretty "regular" compared to other languages. Not that many exceptions. People tell me that pronunciation is usually pretty straight forward compared to e.g. English. There are also some weird rules that I don't recall ever hearing before. e.g. everything ending in "-chen" or "-lein" uses "das" as an article.

Not sure if German learners can confirm/deny the learning complexity compared to other languages.

[merb]

yeah the basic stuff. but when it comes to tenses, etc. Just look at job descriptions, even feminists don't care about our language.

[lorenzhs]

Neue Rechtschreibung makes things simpler when learning the language. It's only hard to internalize the changes, but esier when learning from scratch. It brings spelling and pronunciation in line. For example, daß doesn't make any sense if you know that "ß" is preceded by a long vowel whereas "ss" (as n the new spelling, dass) is preceded by a short one.

Others have already noted that the other things you mentioned may not be as bad as they seem to you.