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Subject: Re: German, misconceptions

Author: José de Jesús García Ruvalcaba

Date: 04:31:38 08/04/01

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On August 03, 2001 at 16:08:45, Tom Kerrigan wrote:

>Contrary to what's been posted already, German is not especially similar to
>English,

Fully agreed!

>nor easy to learn,

Probably you are right but your choice of words is discouraging (:

>and learning to read technical German is much easier
>than striving for fluency.
>

I think that applies to any language.

>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

True! The worst mistake while learning German is trying to compare the structure
of the sentences to what you already know from your language.

>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.

Almost all the Germans are actually very polite, and they do not really mind to
hear poor German by a foreigner. The worst thing that can happen is that you say
something funny and they smile (:

>
>-Tom

José.



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