Walter's Famous German Language Essentials Guide

[Claude via Digitalmars-d]

> LOL. Well, every language has its quirks - especially with the 
> commonly used words (they probably get munged the most over 
> time, because they get used the most), but I've found that 
> French is far more consistent than English - especially when 
> get a grammar book that actually explains things rather than 
> just telling you what to do. English suffers from having a lot 
> of different sources for its various words. It's consistent in 
> a lot of ways, but it's a huge mess in others - ...

Several years ago, I read "Frankenstein" of Mary Shelley (in 
english), and I was surprised to see that the english used in 
that novel had a lot of french sounding words (like "to 
continue", "to traverse", "to detest", "the commencement" etc), 
which are now seldom used even in litterature. There was very few 
verb constructions like "get up", "come on", "carry out" etc...

> ... though I for one think that the fact that English has no 
> gender like languages such as French and German is a huge win.

Yes, I think the difficulty in english is mostly pronunciation, 
and irregular verbs (which actually many languages enjoy: french, 
german, spanish...).