Difficulties For The English Speaker When Learning German

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Learning German can be a lot of fun. Whether you're simply naming various beers and sausages or stringing breath-defying compound words together (an often cited example is "Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapit?n" which simply means "Danube steamship company captain"), German is an equally unique and fun language to teach yourself. Learning how to speak German can be tough at times, but if you're still not charmed by it, consider that it's also one of the most widely spoken languages in Europe, or maybe you're one of the more practical types who just wants to do business in the EU. In any case, learning how to speak German presents a few problems to the English speaker in several aspects.

First of all, German has some sounds and letters not used in the English language. Some of them most obvious ones are the umlauts. They are those curious-looking dots you see above vowels sometimes. You've probably only really used "?" (or possibly "?") as an SMS smiley, but you'll notice that these kinds of letters are used extensively in German texts knowing when to use these new letters especially how to pronounce them, when to write them, is the first challenge you must overcome to learn how to speak German.

As soon as you've become familiar with spelling and the odd German phonetics you can apply your new found skills to memorizing a few words. You can start with nouns: numbers, days of the week, months, things like that. Keep in mind that words are spelled as they are spoken, making spelling easy given that you've mastered the phonetics. Also, in German, all nouns are capitalized. This saves you the trouble of having to distinguish between common and proper nouns.

However, the next challenge for a person teaching themselves German has to do with nouns. The hard part about nouns isn't really stringing them together as compound words as was mentioned earlier, but the fact that all German nouns have a gender. In English, we don't really pay attention to gender that much. German also has 3 genders. In German, assigning gender to nouns is actually kind of random. Inanimate objects aren't necessarily neuter. And nouns that are masculine or feminine in English may fall under any one of the 3 genders. So when memorizing German nouns, I recommend that you always make sure you take note of gender. A helpful way to do this would be to include a corresponding gender-specific article with the noun you're memorizing, "der, die or das".

When it comes to German verbs and adjectives though, you'll be thankful to note that like in English they aren't gender-specific. The same can't be said for other European languages like Spanish. The only thing to worry about when teaching yourself German is sentence structure, which does not share many similarities with English.

All in all, despite its difficulties, learning German should be easier than you might expect at first glance, especially if you're only out to teach yourself basic phrases. So, besides phonetics, gender would be the most difficult part of learning German since it is random. Otherwise, there's really nothing stopping you from learning German.

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