The Mystical Man

The Beauty of the English Language

23 posts in this topic

On 4.9.2022 at 4:18 PM, The Mystical Man said:

The three articles, the four cases, and the subjunctive mood make German difficult. 

The three articles actually are pretty much irrelevant to communicate with Germans. They will still understand you without problems, even if you use the wrong article (some foreigners kinda gave up on learning them for each word and use almost always the same article, because it's easier). The only drawback is that Germans can immediately tell that you are not a native speaker. But I think in the German language there are many more "traps" like this anyway. :) I just found it funny that people always bring up the three articles when they talk about difficulty (French has two articles as well), when there are much more harder things within the German language like the four cases you mentioned.

 

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I find the Chinese languages (Mandarin and Cantonese) extremely difficult since they seem so unpractical. While grammar is almost completely absent (which makes it seem extremely easy), the most complicated thing is the tone system, where one sound / syllable can be pronounced in several different ways and each then creates a different word with a different meaning. Not to mention that one has to study thousands of different characters, one for each word. But also that's the fascinating part about it, of course.

Funnily the Korean language is supposed to be much much easier, since it is based again on an alphabetic system.

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