[hilbert42]

I've often thought the only saving grace for those learning goddamn English as a second language is that they are spared all this gendered nouns nonsense (that is except for a few special cases).

Gendered nouns, both in French and German, have always been a problem for me. German came later but I recall at school that the beginning of each chapter of my French textbook had a list of nouns each preceded by its article and learning them was a pain. After school I'd sit on my bed bashing my head against the pages of the textbook whilst trying to learn these damn genders, they made no logical sense to me and rules for remembering them had so many exceptions that they were essentially useless. I hated learning them.

German was a whisker easier in that I was in German-speaking Austria when I was learning it so I was exposed to the nouns' usage on a daily basis. For me, the real gotchas in German were its damn declensions!

In my opinion, the only effective way to learn these genders is to be smothered in the language on a daily basis—this way, somehow, one learns them by a form of osmosis.

As already mentioned elsewhere, Appendix D - The Awful German Language in Mark Twain's The Tramp Abroad is a quintessential summing up of the difficulties a native English speaker has in learning German. It's a brilliant summary, not only is it hilariously funny but also he gives some excellent examples from different aspects of the language such as separable verbs, gendered and compound nouns and those damn German adjectives.

It's a while since I've read it so I can't remember chapter and verse but I'd thoroughly recommend anyone interested in the matter of German genered nouns read his bit on the 'sex' of fishwives and young girls. Appendix D also has some unforgettable comments on the length of German compound words—something to the effect that 'they stretch across the page like mountain ranges' and are long enough 'to have perspective.'

It's a must-read.

[shankr]

> German was a whisker easier in that I was in german-speaking Austria when I was learning it so I was exposed to the nouns' usage on a daily basis. For me, the real gotchas in German were its damn declensions!

But that's what makes gender more complex in German than Latin languages. It really breaks any level of competency you can have in German. You can write correctly subject verb agreement but put wrong declension and people will think you have no competency in the language.

I have spent way less time learning Spanish (~2.5 years) and it's still much better than my German (on and off for last 7 years). Every time I open my mouth to speak German my head spins around "oh what declension I might be missing". I speak Spanish without having any such thought. The only tricky part of Spanish is subjunctive which I ignore completely.

[hilbert42]

Right, I can't agree more.

I've not learned Spanish but just about every native English speaker I've spoken to who has learned Spanish says that it's the easiest foreign language to learn.

Even with my very, very limited experience with Spanish I reckon that's likely true as I've occasionally figured out a phrase or two of the language without Google Translate.

BTW, I don't at all consider myself very proficient in German, I somehow manage to get by when I have to—and that lack of proficiency is for the very reasons you mention.

___

Edit:

"But that's what makes gender more complex in German than Latin languages. It really breaks any level of competency you can have in German. You can write correctly subject verb agreement but put wrong declension and people will think you have no competency in the language."

Exactly. My way around this is to have native German speakers speak to me in English as so often their English is much better than my German (of course, doing that doesn't help improve my German but sometimes communications is easier). I am regularly surprised at the excellent quality of many German speakers many of whom have essentially native English fluency (it makes one feel humble given that many of them actually reside in their home countries and don't have the same exposure to English as if they they lived in the US). I've often thought that the complicated and more formal grammar of German must give them a boost when it comes to understanding the intrinsic grammatical structure of English but I've never really gotten to the crux of the matter.

An excellent example of a native German speaker who speaks impeccable and often quite idiomatic English is the physicist Sabine Hossenfelder. It's worth watching her in action in these YouTube 'send-up' videos about English and language:

'How to speak English like Einstein':

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hmy-N4AFNDM

'What's the difference between American and British English?':

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP0GQS-s4Gw

If I could speak German as well as she speaks English I'd be mightily pleased.

However, this doesn't necessarily apply when Germans try to learn French. I know a number of Germans who speak excellent English but who truly struggle to learn French. Again, it's not clear to me why they find learning one language easy and the other very difficult.

[brezelnbitte]

Spanish is one of the easiest to learn based on the US State Dept’s scale used for training personnel. German is one category more difficult.

https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/

Norwegian I believe is easiest because it follows English sentence structure closely. Knowing German and English makes Dutch easy to read but not pronounce.

[hilbert42]

Thanks for the link it is quite informative. With Spanish at 24 weeks and French at 30 it's probably what I'd expect given the comments of those who've studied Spanish. Similarity, German at 36 weeks is clearly more difficult to learn, and it bears out both my own experience and that of shankr.

Your comment about Norwegian is interesting. I've no knowledge of Norwegian but on more than one occasion I've been watching a subtitled Norwegian movie on TV only to be startled suddenly when I've understood a phrase or two (it's as if the movie had dropped into English for a second or two), clearly quite a number of the words are the same as in English, so too the language's structure.

Re Dutch, I've been in the Netherlands on many occasions and I've found the language has many similarities with German but there are many gotchas too. Many nouns are very similar but some common ones that one would expect to be the same as German are very different. As for pronunciation, that's something that I'd never really attempt (nor was it necessary as so many Dutch spoke excellent English).

Years ago, I had a Dutch girlfriend who came from The Hague. When she was living there she worked in a secretarial capacity for the Dutch Government. She spoke often about the great importance of using correct and very precise Dutch at important levels of government, here correct usage was much more important than the equivalent situation in the anglophone world (the use of correct Dutch is an important indicator of both one's education and status). Incidentally, she spoke impeccable English, so too her German.

PS: Interesting factoid, the Dutch equivalent of the OED, Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal, is the largest dictionary in the world (bigger than the OED): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woordenboek_der_Nederlandsche_....

[epilys]

My native language is Greek and it has grammatical genders. It's not a "problem" for native speakers because children soak nuanced details incredibly fast. You never hear kids have problems with it, only non native speakers, usually from the Anglosphere because the concept is absent from English thus unfamiliar.

English too has subtle grammar rules that after close inspection are surprisingly complex yet most native speakers don't realise they know them. A good example is the adjective order. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/senten...