By Rok Ružič
... even though native speakers of both may struggle with each other's languages at times?
Absolutely not!
German has a number of grammatical features, that make it much more complicated and therefore difficult to learn than English.
English is grammatically rather poor. No cases, no genders, no inflections, it has a few tenses, but the tense structure is not very complicated, so the tenses are easy to figure out.
English is probably the easiest language to learn, at least among the European languages. I am not sufficiently familiar with Asian and African languages to be able to tell.
But let's have an example. Let's say we want to find out, whether somebody is feeling fine.
In English one would ask
Are you OK?
And that pretty much settles it for all occasions, whether you are asking one person or two or several, whether they are your friends or people you don't know, whether they are male of female.
In German, many of these caveats come into play.
If you are asking a close friend, you would say
Bist du OK?
If you are asking someone you don't know, you need to use the formal language, so you would ask
Sind sie OK?
If there are several people, you would ask
Seid ihr OK?
This is just a small example, and I don't want to get into the cases, because my German is rusty, but German is a lot more complicated than English, and German isn't the most complicated language by far.
I have recently learned Ukrainian, and even as a speaker of several Slavic languages, I was initially overwhelmed by all the inflections. Ukrainian has several levels of inflections, all bearing different meanings to the word.
For example, a word like дзвонити (to call on the phone) can be heavily inflected on a number of levels and become зідзвонюватися (to continually call each other on the phone).
To sum it up. Native German speakers have little problems learning English. German speakers are familiar with the Germanic sentence structure and grammatical features, they merely need to forget about genders and cases and learn English vocabulary, which is not all that different from German vocabulary.
English speakers have much more problems learning German than vice versa. They need to pick up cases and genders, which feel unnatural to English speakers at first.
There is a reason English is so widespread. It spread wide because it's easy to learn. If you want to learn the first foreign language, English is the easiest by far and for a number of reasons.
A meme illustrating complexity of German and comparative simplicity of English.
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