german

Im having a great time learning german so far. Its a beautiful language with a lot of nuances!

Maybe its too soon too speak, ive been only learning it for ~9 months now but the actual difficulties im facing are different of what i was expecting

Before diving into it i thought that maybe the declensions were too difficult. But thats not the case. You might not decline perfectly, but with very little practice you can decline good enough to be honest

Or the huge long-ass words. But once you recognize the words inside, this is not really a problem. Even if you dont know the meaning of every word inside, you know more or less where to cut it

Or the gender of the nouns. But once I learned the gender along the word, i dont seem to forget it again 95% of the times. Also, although there are no rules, you can develop a sense of what the gender of a noun is even without knowing the meaning. I guess it right most of the time by now!

The actual difficult things i found are:

• Words dont translate 1 to 1. In the case of english-spanish translations, words that dont translate 1-1 are the exception more than the rule. So far i learned 7 words that more or less translate to “but/however”, 18 words for “to get/receive”, 79 for “to miss” and 124 words for “to happen/to occur”. Im just learning them all in a frecuency of use fashion. I hope to be able to grasp the nuances of use in the future ;)

• The fact that german is a very nuanced language. They use actual words to convey meaning that other languages might convey via entonation or not convey at all. Basically you are very likely to lose a lot of nuanced meaning when translating from german!

• Many many words look the same! Its not just one or a handful, its many many of them that are very similar with a different meaning

Id say at least half the words i learned so far are like this

If you dont believe me, just check it out. I made a list of dificult german words

And these are only words that i know already (more or less) and 95% of them belong to the top 1000 more frequently used words. Many many more are missing!