Comment on Are separable verbs a thing in ENG?

• cattywampas@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  I think learning any second language is hard, but German is probably the easiest for native English speakers because it’s the most closely related of any major language. It was as easy or easier for me to learn than Spanish and definitely easier than when I tried learning Polish or Irish.

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  • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    I think Dutch is even more closely related, and AFAIK has somewhat simpler grammar. To me as someone fluent in German and English, but who’s never learned Dutch, Dutch looks like a mix of German, English, and gibberish.

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    • SleeplessCityLights@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      I believe Norwegian and Swedish are easier. They are de-gendered and have the exact same grammer. It is just word substitution and even that is easy because some come from the same root.

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  • starlinguk@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    No. No it’s not. I speak both fluent English and Dutch and German is an absolute bloody nightmare.

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• kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Compared to English, which is three languages in a trenchcoat, or Mandarin, which is tonal and has ~100k characters, ~3k of which is considered the minimum to know for fluency, or Japanese, which has three different writing systems, one of which even high-schoolers aren’t expected to know well?

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  • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Compared to English: yes, definitely. English doesn’t really have case markings outside of pronouns, nor adjectival declensions, not even grammatical gender.

    Compared to Mandarin: probably German is easier, I agree on that.

    Compared to Japanese: I don’t know enough about Japanese to know for sure, but by the standards by which it has “three writing systems”, the Latin (and Cyrillic and Greek) alphabet also has two (uppercase and lowercase). :P

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  • cattywampas@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    I hate this “three languages in a trenchcoat” analogy. English is very much a Germanic language with some vocabulary from French. And it’s not unique in that regard either.

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