How difficult is German?

Question

On a scale from 1 (easy)-10 (hard), how difficult is German and WHY?

Answer 1

Well, I've got some hard data and some personal experience for you.

The hard data from this website says that it could take up to 30 weeks and 1140 class hours to get a decent handle on the language. Remember that these are INTENSIVE classes, not just 30 minutes a day.

From personal experience, I took two semesters of German in college. German was somewhat more difficult than Spanish, being that German has cases and nouns and articles change their form depending on the case. Also, German has a high incidence of compound words, where you could have 6 words compounding to make one one.

Also word order is slightly different, so you have to get used to putting the verb in a certain place, etc.

So, how difficult is German? Well, if you live in the USA, I would say a 9. But not because of the grammar and pronunciation. I think it's extremely difficult because not many people speak it. It's much easier to learn a language when you have access to native speakers.

That's why Spanish is leaps and bounds easier than German (even though it's not necessarily "easy" nor much more "easier" than German).

So my rating: 9 (because of the slightly more complex grammar and lack of native speakers running around).

Answer 2

a scale's tough to apply

to start german's really quite easy, maybe a 3, as it's really similar to english and very phoentically spelled.

But then as you get better (after about a year to a year and a half of regular language classes) the need to learn more grammar in german is needed.  Grammar in german is a total *****: they have very strict sentence order in german, and there are crazy rules which make things hectic and change the genders of nouns. very nit picky stuff. this stage is probably a 7.5

So for a basic, none to perfect but passable level or german, very easy. But to take it beyond that is a lot harder. Overall though, german's probably a 6.