[wirrbel]

> Personally, I feel like I can be much more precise in English than I can in German (although that's probably mostly impartiality again!) Yes there are lots of words that are ostensibly just synonyms of each other, but they're mostly not true synonyms, because they have different connotations and can be used in different ways. I miss that wealth of vocabulary in German, where it often feels like I say more to get across the exact idea that I want to.

Don't know if you are still reading this but nevertheless I wanted to give a reply to this paragraph. Overall I think I really understand your point here, but these various connotations are to me not precision, but a symptom of a high-risk of imprecision if that makes sense. In German (there I am partial), or in french (there I would be impartial) I think that language is more precise because if in doubt, you just add a relative clause or another sentence.

You know, learning English and French in Germany, after 4 years of french classes (like 4h per week) my 4th year of french classes was with the same teacher who also taught English. She made a comparison, when learning english you basically are able to speak fairly easily already in your first or second year on a basic level. To become proficient it takes however a decade of learning and mastery. With french, most students are struggling for 4 years until the grammar is learned, but then they actually have all tools under their belt to speak and write proper french. the rest is filling a few wholes in your vocabulary-knowledge here and there and memorizing a few more irregular verb forms.