With the caveat that every language is difficult to learn, German seems to be a particularly strange example of a particularly complex language for an English speaker to learn if you consider the following: the pronouns are very similar; English and German have the same cases except that the accusative and dative have somehow merged together in English; that German and English have almost the same verbal forms, except we don’t use the second person singular anymore and that for whatever reason, English seems to tend toward dropping final “n” and the final unstressed /ə/ has disappeared.
If you are talking about a budding English polyglot, if you consider that the other most studied language, French, has twice as many verbal tenses as English and German or that very few English people learn Urdu or Polish, the main community languages in England, or Welsh, Gaelic, Manx, Irish or Breton (the languages of our neighbours) compared to German, I don’t understand where the idea that German is unfathomably difficult comes from.
That’s not to say that it isn’t hard to learn - and it is - but compared to its neighbours, it is more similar than different to English.
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