Walter's Famous German Language Essentials Guide

[Nick Sabalausky via Digitalmars-d]

On 05/02/2016 12:22 PM, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>
> In any case, learning any new language is hard - especially the farther it
> is from your own (e.g. Asian languages are going to generally be pretty
> brutal to learn for someone speaking a European languages).
>

That sounds reasonable to expect, but I'm a native english speaker who's 
(attempted to) study both german and japanese, and I found german 
considerably more difficult than japanese. But maybe I'm just weird.

I like to assume the reason was *because* german is so much more similar 
to english (and english makes no sense even to a native speaker!) The 
word genders didn't help, either.

Japanese seemed a little simpler and more logical and consistent overall 
(ex: not only no word genders, but very little singular/plural, and 
answering a negative question is straightforward instead of completely 
backwards like in english[1]). But that perception could have simply 
been due to being a novice at it.

I really do think I never would've been able to learn english if it 
wasn't native to me.

[1] "Did you NOT go to the store?" If it's true that you didn't go, the 
expected answer is..."No". Really?!? Or you could answer either "Yes, 
that's correct" or "Yes, I went" which are *opposite* answers despite 
both being "yes". WTF?!? Even I often have to pause when answering a 
negative question in english. I chalk it up to too many native english 
speakers being stupid and not knowing how to answer questions sanely ;)