<story><title>The Awful German Language (1880)</title><url>https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>locallost</author><text>As someone who&amp;#x27;s had to (or maybe wanted to) learn both english and german, I&amp;#x27;d say german has a steeper initial learning curve, but it becomes easier later, whereas english can be easy to get going, but it&amp;#x27;s difficult to master (obviously the spelling, but also the more advanced use of tenses etc).&lt;p&gt;Regarding Twain&amp;#x27;s complaints, the biggest lesson I learned from learning german at an older age was: languages are nonsensical, illogical, and the sooner you stop trying to make sense of it all, the faster you will advance. Children do not learn languages by being analytical and by comparing to what they already know, they learn by just accepting it as it is. This leads to a funny phenomenon that foreign speakers know the actual rules of a language better than most native speakers, simply because native speakers know things are as they are, but not why. Whether adults are capable of this is a different question, but trying to find logic in a language will only lead to frustration.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Awful German Language (1880)</title><url>https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bumbada</author><text>For those that learn a new language, it is a good idea to suspend criticism on the language while you learn it.&lt;p&gt;Every language has its pains. German using Sein and haven for auxiliary verbs in the past makes things way more complicated to learn. Not to talk about the irregularities of the past participle of verbs(that are not used in speech) that makes reading and writing way harder.&lt;p&gt;But if you focus your mind on that you will for sure stop learning the language because you will have an excuse. The fact is that you could learn it like Germans could too, and in the end English is part germanic.&lt;p&gt;And you can cheat. I learned Mandarin very fast, simplified and traditional script, which is crazy for most people because I cheated. I created my own software tools of spaced repetition software and because as a foreigner I did not have to follow the rules like Chinese nationals do.&lt;p&gt;For example, Chinese take the order of writing characters and the process itself as sacred. For Chinese there is only one way of writing a character, but it doesn&amp;#x27;t need to be that way, you can cheat and learn to identify most important symbols you find on the street fast. The order and calligraphy is secondary.&lt;p&gt;Ironically, the faster you use a language and can read things, the faster you will be able to write it. Just blocking yourself not being able to read a newspaper or novel because you can not write perfectly a symbol does not make sense.&lt;p&gt;The phonetics of Mandarin unless you create software to repeat and repeat and repeat every day is simply impossible for any adult foreigner, because we as children have not learned the basic sounds. German phonetics by comparison is trivial in a tenth of the time.</text></comment>