Studying German

Apr. 22, 2022

I read a conversation between a university student couple in my English textbook. The guy is taking German as an elective, but the woman is puzzled because she doesn't understand the point of it as in her opinion everyone in Germany now speaks English. 

The man disagrees, though, but he discontinues the topic as he is obviously not prepared to offer an example to counter her argument. 

It turns out, though, that his main reason for choosing to take German is somewhere else. In fact, it has to do with the fact that his parents spoke the language all the time when he was a kid. Thanks to this advantage of his, he can still remember quite a few German words, which is expected to give him advantage in getting good grades. 

Later, when the woman asked him how his class was going, he admitted the grammar was harder than he had expected, but that his teacher said his pronunciation was really good, thanks mainly to his ample exposure to his parents speaking the language in his childhood. At the end of the conversation, he is hopeful that he will ace the course by getting a good grade in the final exam. 

The conversation got me wondering why I took German as an elective when I was in uni. One thing I remember is that I chose it because I learned German and English are both Germanic languages and therefore similar. I thought learning would be a lot less hard than learning a language of Latin origin, such as French and Italian. 

I was both right and wrong. I was right that they were similar in that their vocabulary was similar. For example, a man in English is ein Mann in German.

However, in terms of grammar their differences far exceeded the similarity observed in vocabulary. One thing that tortured me was different case markers multiplied by three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. 

After all, each language has some unique linguistic rule that can be learned naturally without much effort if you are born and raised in that language, but that are so hard to acquire if you try to master after you reach a certain age. Case markers are one such example. Particles, such as 「て」「に」「を」「は」are probably Japanese counter parts. Native speakers of Japanese can use them naturally without thinking. But adult foreign learners of the language are constantly frustrated by trying to figure out how to use them correctly.