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Comment by hevi_jos | Hacker News Reader

German is not that hard, specially coming from English, which is a germanic language itself.

The Michel Thomas learning audio programs are fantastic for getting a grasp of the language.

If you read and read and watch and watch TV,without analyzing what you do you get naturally the feeling of the language, without the suffering.

Mark Twain did what 99% of Germans,Austrians,Swiss are never going to do. Stop and overthink it too much.

That was probably the most reasonable way to learn German outside Germany in 1880. It is not today.

If you are interested in learning any language, I recommend the book "Fluent forever". It tells you how to start leaning a language and all the resources to learn on your own.

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I don't mind most of German except for gender+case+plural+whatever variables giving you like eight different forms of "the" and similar complexity for "a" and for adjective endings, and even impacting suffixes for the noun (end declinations). Having to think ahead to "okay what's the gender of the noun I'm gonna use three words from now...now factor in the case implied by the preposition preceding it...okay it's 'dem' + '-em' + '-en'".

Like I'm sure English has similarly complicated bullshit (the spelling is obviously a gigantic dumpster fire), but wow it's like a whole grammar domain I have to think about that doesn't even exist in English. It just feels like German has way more "modifiers" and variants of words.

> Having to think ahead to "okay what's the gender of the noun I'm gonna use three words from now.

Now, that's interesting. I'm a native speaker of German, and just the other day I realized that one of the mistakes I keep making in English is to make the "a/an" distinction not based on phonetics, but on agreement with the noun, disregarding any words preceding it: I know that it's "an error", not "a error"; but then I also tend to say (or write) "an common error".

>Mark Twain did what 99% of Germans,Austrians,Swiss are never going to do. Stop and overthink it too much.

The Swiss do not speak German at all.

They speak various forms of Swiss-German dialects, which are related to German, but altogether different languages.

And very wisely, Swiss-German dialects have entirely done away with all the useless grammatical garbage German is settled with.

As a result, Swiss-German - while being far from the most aesthetically pleasing thing to hear - is way easier to learn than hochdeutsch.

Yet somehow, you can perfectly express complex thoughts in Swiss-German and still be understood, so all I've read in this thread about how grammatical complexity is a form of error-correction ... sorry I have to call BS.

> The Swiss do not speak German at all.

> They speak various forms of Swiss-German dialects, which are related to German, but altogether different languages.

These statements are at best wrong, but actually not even that.

There is no hard difference between languages and dialects. Whether a variety gets called "language" or "dialect" is mostly a matter of convention.

The Swiss German dialects are obviously not Standard German. But neither are the dialects spoken in Germany. They are still German dialects.

Also, I'm pretty sure that all German-speaking Swiss also speak Standard German even if it's not their native dialect.

> Yet somehow, you can perfectly express complex thoughts in Swiss-German and still be understood, so all I've read in this thread about how grammatical complexity is a form of error-correction

There is a difference between "you cannot express complex thoughts in Swiss German" and "Swiss German does not have a particular method of error correction that Standard German has". It's not like Swiss German were just a simplified variant of Standard German.

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