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Comment by sajithdilshan | Hacker News Reader

I though English was difficult until I had to learn German

They're closely related - like your two uncles, the German is a strict disciplinarian that it is hard not to find offputting, the English is quite enjoyable and chummy, but erratic, whimsical, and so apt to go off on flights of fancy that after an enjoyable conversation you are not sure what was really said.

There has never been an enjoyable conversation with the German uncle.

on edit: damn these English typos!

That's a cute analogy. Sounds like my maternal and paternal grandfathers :)

German might be a strict disciplinarian, but mostly illogical when it comes to

* Articles (Der, Die, Das) which you need to know correctly in order to form a correct sentence with nominative, akkusative and dative objects. * Plural of the nouns (maybe after a while you would get a feeling of it, but not as easy as adding an 's' to the end of the noun like English)

You just have to remember a lot of stuff :-(

What's great about German is the spelling is consistent. I know that, because I could ace my dictation tests without understanding a good deal of what I was writing.

That's because they regularised the spelling.

Many languages have undergone spelling reforms, e.g. Irish Gaelic in 1948, (if I remember correctly).

English is now a World Language rather than a property of the English, and so this no longer appears possible.

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