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acchariya@lemmy.world 2 days ago
American who did a road trip through Germany for the first time about a month ago (I’m based in France).
It’s great. Great roads, great food, great beer, friendly people, cheaper prices. German seems extremely hard but almost everyone I ran into spoke good English. Grocery stores had interesting products but seemed maybe a bit on the expensive side compared to France. It’s highly regional, so my feedback applies to Baden-Württemberg only. My understanding is that each state is pretty different. In some way, it felt a little like being in an extremely nice part of the US in some alternate reality where gore won in 2000 and built bicycle infrastructure and public transport and fixed the infrastructure.
Mikrochip@feddit.org 2 days ago
I always wonder where that sentiment comes from. Sure, the Grammar is a bit more complex than in English, but afaik it’s still considerably simpler than say Polish.
Plus,they’re fairly closely related, given that they’re both Germanic languages. The writing system is the same, German spelling actually makes sense most of the time, etc. Sure, English imported lots of vocabulary from Romanic languages that German does not have, but learning vocabulary is imho one of the easier aspect of language learning.
Consequently, the FSI classifies German as a category II language, ranging from I (including i.e. Dutch) to IV (which contains Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Arabic), I being the easiest and IV the hardest.
The Chinese writing system alone is enough to discourage people from learning the language up to a fluent level…