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Comment by rightbyte | Hacker News Reader

Dunno how Romanic languages could be considered easier to learn than German for English-speakers. Or why Austrian German would be harder than German.

The stats is probably mainly a vague map of mother tongue languages of the employees. It probably does not take many to shift the stats a lot.

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German has complicated morphology and an unfamiliar word order, and, unlike in Romance languages, abstract nouns usually do not have cognates.

Genealogically closer languages are not always easier to learn. I don't think anyone would say that, for example, Icelandic should be easier for an English speaker than is Spanish or French.

Ye maybe. It's probably mainly that I personally had such an easier time to learn German than French, so I might extrapolate my experience a bit too much.

I found German noun declensions a pain to learn and you basically just have to memorize the gender of each noun. Spanish grammar is simpler in comparison and the -a vs -o ending tells you the gender of most nouns.

Also, like the article mentions, English has just as many words with Latin roots as it does Germanic.

There's probably comprehensibility and fluency--which aren't necessarily the same thing. As a native English speaker, it seems natural that Romance languages are easier than German--probably because of German grammar complexity. Dutch is something of an outlier there just because it's so relatively close to English though I have no real personal experience.

In my experience it's the vocabulary. Sometimes it feels like for every word like "Hand" that's easy to recognize there's a dozen like "Ausbildung" that aren't. (For comparison, the French word for Ausbildung is "éducation.")

The Latin language borrowings tend to be closer to the European versions orthographically, to the point where you can understand the general intent of a lot of notices even without speaking a word. Common German words like Leben and Mutter and Fuß might be derived from the same root as English words but you'd never guess based on how much evolution has happened in the language since. Conversely a lot of English words are so close to Romance language equivalents that if you're struggling for vocabulary there's a decent sized chance that an approximately similar Latin-derived English word with local pronunciation (and appropriate conjugation) will be understood.

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