Is German Easy to Learn?

Learning a new language is hard no matter how you look at it, but it's not impossible. When you decide to take on the challenge, you're probably asking Google what are the easiest or hardest languages to learn. How do we determine the difficulty level of a language?

The difficulty of a language can be categorized by a couple of different things:

• Language family
• Your native language
• Grammar
• Pronunciation

Now that we have those covered, let's see if German is easy to learn.

Language Family

German is a Germanic language that belongs to the Indo-European family-like English and Dutch. It's the official language of Germany, Austria, and one of the official languages of Switzerland. It boasts around ninety-million speakers worldwide.

Like many languages, German changed a lot over time. The first was Old High German, you can think of it as Old English. Many German speakers cannot read or understand this dialect.

The second is Middle High German which is more like Shakespearean English. Then the last is New High German which is basically modern German.

Your Native Language

Finding a language that is similar to your native language makes the learning process a bit easier. In the previous paragraph, I mentioned that German is a Germanic language.

Well, I have good news for the native English speakers out there. Did you know that German and English have about 40% of the words in common? Not to mention, there are a lot of phrases, like over 50% common phrases between the two languages.

Can you guess the meaning of these phrases and words?

• Was ist das? (What is that?)
• Apfel (apple)
• Garten (garden)

Grammar

I can imagine when you think about German grammar, you probably feel a migraine coming on. On the surface, German grammar looks complicated and takes time to master. Of course, like Spanish or French, German does have genders for nouns, informal vs formal you, weird rules to making plural words, and verb conjugations. It seems like a lot to take in, but the good news is that the word order is relatively the same as English.

Pronunciation

At a glance, German words look so intimidating. If you are just starting out, it looks like a bunch of random letters jumbled together. The pronunciation is very different from English, unfortunately. There are sounds in German like the "pf" sound that doesn't exist in English or the "q" sound that exists in English, but not German. Once you get a hang of the alphabet sounds and master the vowel combination sounds. Saying most words becomes pretty straight-forward.

Final Thoughts

Ask yourself why you want to learn German. Is it to go to a German-speaking country, to advance in your career, or learn it because you have a passion for languages? After looking at all the different ways to judge if a language is difficult. I know you are looking for a clear-cut answer.

Is German easy to learn? The answer is yes and no.

If your first language is in the same language family then yes it will be easier for you to learn it. As with English and German that are practically sisters. In the end, your abilities as a language learner can only judge if German is easy to learn.

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