It’s also one of the most difficult parts of learning German as an adult, despite being a relatively simple syntactic rule and something we kinda-sorta emulate in English. The other part, at least for me, were false friends. Also sorry to all the lurking Germans waiting to comment, I forgot all of my German the moment I graduated college.
As a German I can assure you that false friends are something you scare away all pupils (regardless of age). I have very intense memories of our English teacher correcting us again and again.
Regarding the composita in German: we are moving more towards the English approach by splitting these word monstrousities with hyphens. E.g. Donaudampfschifffahrtsamt may be spelled Donau-Dampfschifffahrts-Amt. Its way easier to read and write. While the hyphenated spelling is not something that is used often officially, it got more popular in the last decades.
My biggest issue with Duolingo trying to learn German honestly. Sure I can read a compound word when presented with it, but fucking Duo is like “Cool… now spell it… bitch”
German is phonetic though - once you know how pronunciation maps to the alphabet (and certain compounds), it becomes easier to spell any new word. It’s actually why there’s no Spelling Bee in German.
I gave up on duolingo very quickly because it had a ton of clearly wrong stuff too. Drops and Rosetta Stone have much better content for learning German.
I’m nearly at the end of Duolingo’s German content and spelling has mostly been quite easy (as a native English speaker). You want a spelling challenge, try French.
So we have this verb and the ending in third person plural is -ent but we just dont pronounce that so it pronounces the same way as third person singular…
Yeah but the spelling ‘normally’ would have been updated to match English pronunciation. That’s what happens in most languages. As I understand there were two issues:
Some dictionary writers (ca. late 1400s IIRC) wanted spellings that seemed fancier like French and Latin, which is why e.g. the silent B in debt was added ‘artificially’.
The printing press was invented right in the middle of the Great Vowel Shift so old spellings got “locked in” even though spoken English continued to change significantly for a long time afterward.
That’s something different. False cognates are words that look related even tho they are not and often have a similar meaning that makes it look even harder to be related. False friends often are related but have a very different meaning. Like the German word “eventuell” meaning “maybe” which is very bad if you use it wrong. Unlike the false cognate “emoji” meaning “picture sign” and – etymologically speaking – having nothing to do with emoticon despite its similar meaning. Which is more a linguistic fun fact than any problem for learners.
Whilst quite a lot of words are pretty much the same in both languages, “wie” in Dutch means “who” whilst in German it means “how”.
Having learned Dutch first, I can tell you that when I was first learning German the expression “Wie geht’s” tended to give me a serious mental hiccup when I was trying to talk to German people.
It’s also one of the most difficult parts of learning German as an adult, despite being a relatively simple syntactic rule and something we kinda-sorta emulate in English. The other part, at least for me, were false friends. Also sorry to all the lurking Germans waiting to comment, I forgot all of my German the moment I graduated college.
Alles gut. Deine Vergesslichkeit hindert mich nicht daran, hier zu pfostieren.
Doch
As a German I can assure you that false friends are something you scare away all pupils (regardless of age). I have very intense memories of our English teacher correcting us again and again.
Regarding the composita in German: we are moving more towards the English approach by splitting these word monstrousities with hyphens. E.g. Donaudampfschifffahrtsamt may be spelled Donau-Dampfschifffahrts-Amt. Its way easier to read and write. While the hyphenated spelling is not something that is used often officially, it got more popular in the last decades.
oh Christ, please. it really is just the lack of spaces that make them a nightmare.
My biggest issue with Duolingo trying to learn German honestly. Sure I can read a compound word when presented with it, but fucking Duo is like “Cool… now spell it… bitch”
German is phonetic though - once you know how pronunciation maps to the alphabet (and certain compounds), it becomes easier to spell any new word. It’s actually why there’s no Spelling Bee in German.
I learnt to write after hearing in Grundschule. It doesn’t work that well.
I gave up on duolingo very quickly because it had a ton of clearly wrong stuff too. Drops and Rosetta Stone have much better content for learning German.
I once talked to a guy that was learning portuguese all by himself using Langenscheidt’s portuguese course.
They are pretty neat.
That’s your issue? Not adjective declination?
I’m nearly at the end of Duolingo’s German content and spelling has mostly been quite easy (as a native English speaker). You want a spelling challenge, try French.
So we have this verb and the ending in third person plural is -ent but we just dont pronounce that so it pronounces the same way as third person singular…
Fucking French. ‘we’re never, ever going to say this ‘h’ character, but you still need it to spell words correctly because fuck you, that’s why.’
English isn’t exactly innocent there. See knight, plumber, mnemonic, pterodactyl.
Well those are words descendent from Latin and Greek.
Yeah but the spelling ‘normally’ would have been updated to match English pronunciation. That’s what happens in most languages. As I understand there were two issues:
Oh I thought those were false cognates
That’s something different. False cognates are words that look related even tho they are not and often have a similar meaning that makes it look even harder to be related. False friends often are related but have a very different meaning. Like the German word “eventuell” meaning “maybe” which is very bad if you use it wrong. Unlike the false cognate “emoji” meaning “picture sign” and – etymologically speaking – having nothing to do with emoticon despite its similar meaning. Which is more a linguistic fun fact than any problem for learners.
Another example of a false friend:
German: Bekommen (to get), English: Become (werden)
Hence a joke I often heard while learning English:
Whilst quite a lot of words are pretty much the same in both languages, “wie” in Dutch means “who” whilst in German it means “how”.
Having learned Dutch first, I can tell you that when I was first learning German the expression “Wie geht’s” tended to give me a serious mental hiccup when I was trying to talk to German people.
Tja