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Comment by egeozcan | Hacker News Reader

Contrary to what most people believe, I see that native English speakers can learn German rather easily (with a pretty distinct accent, which I really like :)).

Your point stands though, as they usually don't know this before they actually start learning, so they must have other reasons.

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Totally irrelevant but perhaps amusing:

In my American high school, I took German as a second language (yay Wisconsin). I then took Mandarin Chinese in college. Even in my fifth year, when a teacher asked me a question, I had a 50/50 chance of thinking of the answer in German first. It was utterly maddening.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to travel abroad or maintain that knowledge, so all I really remember is "ich spreche nür ein bischen deutch". That, and the day that my teacher asked me what "ich habe keine ahnung" meant, I didn't know. She had me ask another student... Imagine my frustration when the only answer was "I have no idea".

"Contrary to what most people believe, I see that native English speakers can learn German rather easily"

I doubt that. While English is part of the West Germanic languages, there are huge grammatical differences. I assume it would be much easier for a Polish or Russian Person to learn German than for an English.

The sentence "Man bites Dog" and "Dog bites Man" has a different meaning in English, due to to position of the noun. In German, both is possible.

"Der Hund beisst den Mann" and

"Den Mann beisst der Hund" has the same meaning.

Declension makes the word order in German very flexible.

As a native English speaker who studied German, Russian, and Polish, German was much easier to learn than the Slavic languages. The case system is smaller than Russian or Polish, and there are far more cognates which makes learning vocabulary much easier. Also, articles (e.g., "a" and "the") are notoriously difficult for non-native speakers of English, but German is similar enough.

Learning cases is a little hard, and the silly capitalization rules are a hindrance, but probably the most difficult thing in German for most English speakers is waiting for the damn verb to make its appearance. It's harder to guess what it will be than it is for native German speakers.

I would guess that learning German would be easier than English for a native speaker of a Slavic language, though, precisely because syntax plays such a critical role in English, which has only the barest vestiges of a case system remaining. My Russian friends in particular make some amusing errors with word order sometimes, but I think it's charming.

Edit: and for the example given, "Man bites dog" and "Dog bites man," what is required is a verb change, perhaps a couple of articles, and correct capitalization (unless it's a news headline, in which case it's fine). So, "Dog bites Man" can be written as "The man was bitten by a dog" with the same meaning. English verbs are also hard for non-native speakers, though.

I guess some of this is also, to what level do you need to learn German? Some of the parts of German grammar that are difficult for English speakers can be mostly avoided by just phrasing things differently. Basic use of cases is necessary, but some of the rules around compound sentences can be skipped at first by just using simpler sentences. If what you're after is a reasonable conversational/email level of German, that's enough for many things, and you can always learn more constructs later. If you want to be a professor in the humanities and need to write/speak a formal academic level of German, that's different, but that's probably not the common case for HN readers.

Mann beisst Hund.

Hund beisst Mann.

Perfect German. Different meaning.

I doubt that Polish people or Russian people learn German much easier. Somehow in English speaking countries there is this fear to learn a very similar language.

There are numbers how long it takes for an English speaker to learn a different language... German belongs to the easiest group.

https://blog.thelinguist.com/how-long-should-it-take-to-lear...

"Perfect German. Different meaning." Debatable if a German teacher would accept this sentence in an Essay, except as a stylistic element. Please try to understand the concept of word order and Declension. Try to translate the latin phrase morituri te salutant to English and German. If you can, you have understood declension.

"There are numbers how long it takes for an English speaker to learn a different language... German belongs to the easiest group."

What is really totally irrelevant for the discussion. Please try again to understand the topic.

> Debatable if a German teacher would accept this sentence in an Essay, except as a stylistic element

That's not relevant to determine whether this is valid German. An easy Google finds zillions of these:

https://www.mdr.de/sachsen-anhalt/magdeburg/magdeburg/hund-b...

https://bnn.de/lokales/achern/rheinau-gebissen

> What is really totally irrelevant for the discussion. Please try again to understand the topic.

Please read your own post to understand the topic:

>> I see that native English speakers can learn German rather easily

> doubt that

I gave you a reference to how difficult learning German for English speakers is seen: German is in the 'easy' group.

Boatloads of native English speaking expats in Germany would love it if this were true.

Oh, it’s not hard, I agree.

I just think that continentals being taught English so they can do business with the Americans is probably very common.

Can you tell the difference between American and British English speakers?

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