Author: Tom Kerrigan
Date: 13:08:45 08/03/01
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Contrary to what's been posted already, German is not especially similar to English, nor easy to learn, and learning to read technical German is much easier than striving for fluency. There are a lot of German words that look/sound similar to English words (but don't necessarily have the same meaning), but there are a vast number of words that are completely different. On top of that, German grammar is radically different and relatively difficult. French vocabulary is much closer to English vocabulary and Spanish is easy to learn because its grammar has a trivial number of exceptions. According to the US military intelligence, Spanish is the easiest language to learn and German is only slightly easier than Russian or Chinese. Learning to read a subset of a language (say, for computer chess) is always easier than learning the entire language. True, you won't learn computer chess words in the German classes you might take, but there aren't that many computer chess words. If you do learn some German (which I reccomend), be sure to visit Germany to try it out sometime. Even if you don't learn much, it's a pretty amazing experience to have people understand you even though you feel like you're speaking gibberish. -Tom
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