I think the hardest aspect of learning German as an American from native German speaking instructors is due to the manner in which the language is taught.
One part of this is the assumption that Americans have some/any familiarity with the language, and that is simply wrong. We are simply not exposed to the German language at all, for obvious reasons.
Tangent >> it's also funny how Austria is coded as a Category 3 language while Germany is Category 2 :o
> it's also funny how Austria is coded as a Category 3 language while Germany is Category 2 :o
Honestly, I'm not surprised. German Austrian dialects are quite strong, omnipresent and difficult to learn (few resources apart from going in the streets).
I suppose it depends what language you're even using for Switzerland. I can handle the French in Switzerland more or less the same as I can handle French anywhere else (not that great), German and Italian not well at all, and Romansh pretty much non-existently.
Switzerland is also French and Italian-speaking (and English is becoming the linga franca more and more, as even Swiss-Germans don't like to speak actual German ("Hochdeutsch") and prefer Schwyzerdütsch).
>Tangent >> it's also funny how Austria is coded as a Category 3 language while Germany is Category 2 :o
Well, Austrians, much to their national pride, don't really speak German, but they have their own localized dialect forks of it which are more difficult to understand for foreigners who only learned "vanilla" German, so the map is correct in this regard.
It's why Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn't allowed to dub his own American movies to German, but the studios got a German actor to voice him since his Styrian dialect was considered too strong for most German speakers.
Similar with Swiss German.
No matter how well you think you know German, you'll always run into a dialect you won't understand.
> It's why Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn't allowed to dub his own American movies to German
Funny that they were worried about Schwarzenegger speaking German with a strong accent, given that he speaks English with such a strong accent, and they allowed that to be in the movies.
I have a friend who was born in Germany but grew up in Switzerland. His wife was born and grew up in Lichtenstein. They have been married for 20+ years and they /still/ occasionally can't understand each other when they slip into their childhood dialects.
I mean yes some Austrian dialects are hard, but the grammar is the same in Austria and Germany, and apart from certain words that sometimes confuse the other it's still the same German.
Especially at the border you can have German pupils to attend schools in Austria and vice versa and none of them needs a special class for learning the other German language
>but the grammar is the same in Austria and Germany,
Sure but that's only useful for writing, and quickly becomes irelevant in speaking when you can't understand the dialect because every word is pronounced differently than what you know. Two languages can share the same grammar rules yet be completely different from one another becasue the words themselves are different.
>Especially at the border
That's a very silly argument. Firstly, border regions between countries often share dialect similarities because d'uh, geographical proximity. A virtual line in the dirt doesn't mean two people will suddenly speak vastly different when they've evolved together for centuries only separated by a few km.
And secondly, they're both native German speakers, of course they don't need translators between each others, but that wasn't my point. My point was specifically that foreigners who learn "vanilla" German might end up needing translators when they hear some of those Austrian dialects(maybe Bavarian too, IDK).
> My point was specifically that foreigners who learn "vanilla" German might end up needing translators when they hear some of those dialects.
With respect to that map though it doesn't matter because someone learning German for traveling to Germany and someone learning German for traveling to Austria will learn the same language, so it doesn't make sense to color it differently.
The dialect is something you acquire while being embedded in the region after you already know German
It totally does, because the "vanilla" German you learn back home in the US will be less useful to you in Austria due to the difficult dialects, than it will be in Germany where you'll have an easier time.
Signed, someone who learned German before moving to Austria. drops_mic.gif
i've spent a considerable amount of time trying to learn mandarin. I can tell you there's far less sound diversity in mandarin. sound recognition is incredibly hard for that language for english speakers. everything sounds the same and even the four tones can be difficult to differentiate between. what makes it even harder is all the words and grammar that's left out, that the listener is forced to determine everything from context which makes it even harder if you didn't recognize a few of the words.
> Considering all that effort, why would an English-speaker—even a diplomat—learn another language? Doesn’t everybody else speak English anyway?
Everybody else speaking English, means they can communicate with you, if they want to.
It doesn't mean you can follow along with conversation at a party or social event or work environment. You will often be left out of the loop, even if not intentionally.
In not too polite https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAjVZXpQToI starting from 48 second there's an illustration of how English could create communication problems to English speakers.
Yeah. It's a cost of doing business (of whatever sort in a country that isn't predominantly English-speaking). Either expend the considerable energy or time or do something else.
You have to learn a new alphabet for Russian. This is also one of the reasons for the high difficulty classification of the Asian languages that have their own scripts.
To find out how difficult it will be to learn a script just have a look at mechanical typewriters used for those scripts:
Russian/Ukrainian: [1]
Greek: [2]
Chinese: [3]
Learning Cyrillic or Greek or Asian phonetic scripts like Katakana or Hangul is not that difficult since they are conceptually similar to Latin script. Learning ideographic scripts like those used in China or Japan (Kanji) is another story.
One thing to keep in mind is that these lists conflate difficulty with time. If you like Chinese, learning Chinese isn't difficult - it's fun. It just takes a while. If you find Spanish dull, then learning Spanish is difficult, even though it would hypothetically take less time to learn.
for chinese, if you're not capable of recognizing those sounds reliable, it won't just be really hard, it'll be completely impossible. even if every word spoken is one you already know, if your hearing can't distinguish it, then you don't have a chance.
It would be cool if there is a similar study for those who learned English as second language. I understand it is difficult endeavor because the study needs to be replicated for every major languages out there.
The Foreign Service Institute training is also full-time, 8+ hours a day, working with dedicated tutors in small groups. Basically, it's your job to learn the language.
This isn't taking a semester of high school language instruction or playing with Duolingo for six months. It's basically doing nothing else during working hours and maybe homework for over half a year in what would have probably been close to a $100K crash course.
They mean 24 weeks in a residential, 24 hour a day program, where you sign an oath never to speak in anything but the target language, and which is largely attended by people in the armed forces whose career will be affected by their performance. The level is probably about B2/C1, and they expect these people to immediately go to work in the language.
English shares a lot of vocabulary with French, so that's a lot less for English speakers to learn.
These are the estimates for how long it takes to reach the FSI "Speaking 3: General Proficiency in Speaking (S3)" and "Reading 3: General Professional Proficiency in Reading (R3)", which I understand to mean roughly B2 in the CEFR scale.
My personal observation on this is, while Vietnamese is listed as a hard language for English due to differences, I found it's actually a pretty simple language beyond the non-European pronunciation. Grammar sounds like:
You want eat what?
I'm hungry very.
You go no?
etc. I had an easier time learning that than German for example.
Funny comparison, since that's exactly how English itself sounds to speakers of German, French, or Slavic languages. English has almost no grammar, words do not change their forms, endings, almost everything is coded by word order, and sometimes by extra "operator" words.
Doesn't speaking Vietnamese properly involve mastery of tones and a complex system of pronouns/honorifics where you have to figure out the appropriate age/familiarity level which might be more challenging than the actual words?
The main difficulty with learning German is that you tend to get replies in immaculate English
I suspect that there's a difference between what it takes to properly learn a language in school and do well on tests and what it takes to functionally communicate at the street level.
I was looking for Hungarian and didn't see it, unfortunately. I learned a smattering of it some twenty years ago in a study abroad. I remember it was difficult, but fun, to learn.
Three things made it difficult, as I remember: one, it is agglutinative, so you get strings of suffixes on the ends of nouns, verbs, etc.; two, it has zero overlap with English vocabulary, or even the Romantic & Germanic ancestors of English; three, vowel harmonizing takes a bit of practice. None of these is particularly demanding, but they have no equivalents in English.
But a very aesthetically satisfying language once you get the hang of it.
German has complicated morphology and an unfamiliar word order, and, unlike in Romance languages, abstract nouns usually do not have cognates.
Genealogically closer languages are not always easier to learn. I don't think anyone would say that, for example, Icelandic should be easier for an English speaker than is Spanish or French.
Ye maybe. It's probably mainly that I personally had such an easier time to learn German than French, so I might extrapolate my experience a bit too much.
I found German noun declensions a pain to learn and you basically just have to memorize the gender of each noun. Spanish grammar is simpler in comparison and the -a vs -o ending tells you the gender of most nouns.
Also, like the article mentions, English has just as many words with Latin roots as it does Germanic.
There's probably comprehensibility and fluency--which aren't necessarily the same thing. As a native English speaker, it seems natural that Romance languages are easier than German--probably because of German grammar complexity. Dutch is something of an outlier there just because it's so relatively close to English though I have no real personal experience.
In my experience it's the vocabulary. Sometimes it feels like for every word like "Hand" that's easy to recognize there's a dozen like "Ausbildung" that aren't. (For comparison, the French word for Ausbildung is "éducation.")
The Latin language borrowings tend to be closer to the European versions orthographically, to the point where you can understand the general intent of a lot of notices even without speaking a word. Common German words like Leben and Mutter and Fuß might be derived from the same root as English words but you'd never guess based on how much evolution has happened in the language since. Conversely a lot of English words are so close to Romance language equivalents that if you're struggling for vocabulary there's a decent sized chance that an approximately similar Latin-derived English word with local pronunciation (and appropriate conjugation) will be understood.
I've honestly found German to be easier than French, specifically in terms of listening comprehension. It can take a while to get used to word order in German, but I've found it much easier to pick out discrete words compared to French.
Maybe it's because elision is so common in French? e.g. "j’aime l’hiver". I find it hard to decouple those things quickly enough in my head. Most words in German, on the other hand, are spelled exactly as they are pronounced.
Curious if folks have had other experiences with these two languages.
I’ve found French accents and speaking styles to play a large role in how well I can understand spoken French. African and Levantine French speakers are often easier for me to understand than, say, Parisians.
I do find Spanish to have been much easier to develop an ear for than French (I’ve put in far less effort, but can differentiate words about as well) and also for whatever reason I found gaining a sense for noun gender to be extremely easy for Spanish but nearly impossible for French. I can guess and be right the vast majority of the time in Spanish, while in French it often feels like I’m doing worse than 50/50. It doesn’t help that it can be challenging to practice it in isolation, due to how articles work in French. Only way to drill gender effectively is in context, hard to quickly build, say, an Anki deck for it.
This was my experience too. I haven't taken German in 20 years but I can still understand some things tourists say. I studied French 5 years ago with the help of my wife (fluent in French, professional translator) and even doing hours of listening practice daily for months I never got the hang of more than extremely simple phrases. So much is a near-homophone to my American ears.
Oddly, French people understood my French much easier than Germans understood my German. My guess was that I nailed the French grammar but struggled more with the German grammar.
One of the funny things with French is what a sometimes traveling companion sometimes says to me with some exasperation: "They don't pronounce half their letters!" :-) Also makes me realize that, bad as my French is, I knew the language a lot more than they did.
