So far it's actually kind of difficult with the sentence structuring, but I'm slowly getting the hang of it.

German :lovestruc

German is a very difficult language, good luck with it!
As a german speaking person i can say that it is confusing even for me sometimes.
English is so much easier i think.

Him Indoors has been learning German for the past 5 years. He wanders round the house with his tablet tuned to German radio stations.

Poor you, most German radio stations are so incredibly dull that one begins to wonder why they bother with broadcasting at all. And unless you're listening to one of those "high culture" stations the language is usually pretty bad, too.

Well, my German is pretty primitive so I can't generally understand more than the odd phrase. It just burbles in the background.

ich heiser, jesusismyairbag und showzen wunder zon boograuben. hallo, argen starten mich greubenschweiner.

ah, who am I kidding...

I've always wanted to learn German! It seems like such a fun language.

Woot!

I remember picking German over Spanish in Y9 because I had no idea what was going on in the Spanish class! I continued with German during my GCSEs, got an A in the end (which I'm proud of, but I seem to have forgotten most things now)
For me the grammar just made sense, I didn't really need to think about it, I had to "undutchify" my sentnces a little. Unlike my French. Its strange since I've done French since I was 7, and my grammar and spelling still suck. No matter how many times I've been over the same things it won't stick
German and DT were the only two subjects that I ever enjoyed at school, before having to narrow down my subjects.
I'll get back to learning German again...one day!

The only reason I chose German when I was a freshman in high school was because they didn't offer Polish. If they did offer Polish, I would probably get all A's on the homework because I could just ask my mom. She grew up in Poland, so she would know the answers to all of the questions. My dad would be very unhelpful because 1) he definitely doesn't speak much Polish and 2) he's "busy" (aka napping and watching sports while drinking for most of the day).

My family actually taught me Polish before I could go to school and learn English (?), and they still force me to take lessons in Polish even though it's the biggest waste that a Saturday can have. My high school is weird because instead of teaching us a language that we can use if we travel to Western Europe (Spanish, French, Italian, some Slavic or some Germanic language), they choose to teach us LATIN (?!?!?!)

I admit it's kind of cool knowing what almost half of the words in English comes from, and knowing what the mottoes of each state in the US (that has a Latin motto) mean, but it's kind of useless otherwise. Nobody speaks Latin anymore, so you can't really find anyone that's fluent in it.

Post Scriptum- My school offers Ancient Greek too (?!?!?!!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!!?!)

I'm teaching myself, and it's pretty hard. I've been saying "Good evening/night" to people when I was supposed to say "Good afternoon".

Learning Latin isn't really useless.
First of all, learning any modern language from the family of Romance languages, like French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese or Romanian, will be so much quicker with Latin in the background.
Secondly, medicine and biology still use Latin terminology.
And thirdly, there is nothing better to hone your sense for language and linguistic logic than learning a language that noone speaks anymore (and which is also so well structured like Latin). You study it as if it were a scientific object. Seriously, learning Latin for the sake of the language is the smallest aspect of it. Students who learned Latin in school are also usually more articulate and do better in the humanities than those who didn't.

Edit: And there's nothing better for making lots of friends on the internet than telling them that it is totally wrong to write "per say" because it's "per se".

Edit2: And it enables you to add your totally unasked for two cents to another discussion here on these boards by pointing out that the cis/trans dichotomy is total nonsense when used in the context of gender/sex.

Don raises an excellent point!

As "dead" as Latin may be in terms of spoken language, it's really quite prominent throughout our world. A lot of phrases that we use every single day are in Latin. It's also quite helpful if you want to learn some Romance languages. I grew up with Romanian as my first tongue (which, from what I understand, is the closest thing to Latin in terms of spoken language nowadays? I'm not sure, I speak a very garbled mess of dialects), and as much as it helps with French, I'm sure that it'd be a lot easier if I knew Latin before tackling the other Romance languages.

Plus, learning anything - anything at all - will give your brain a workout. Learning languages helps exercise various parts of your brain. Actually, if I'm not mistaken, learning new languages has been linked to decreased chances of dementia, Alzheimer's, etc. I may be wrong on that, though... I'm the furthest thing from a doctor that could ever be, so take my "vast knowledge of medicine" with a grain of salt.

Also, @Don, I got caught using "per say" in the worst misspellings thread. The irony! The agony! Aaagh! (Maybe I should dust off my Latin textbook.)

After my third year at high school I had to choose between French and German for my final two years (Ancient Greek and Latin were only available at a higher level and no others classes were given back then at my school earlier this century), next to Dutch and English, both mandatory. I choose German, because my French sucks, my mothers family hails from Germany and I see more economic advantages for German than French as a Dutchie. It has only been so many years ago, that the knowledge has been dropped somewhere in the back of my head/memory, although I mostly get the general consensus from written texts and listening to German talk and I notice I can re-use it pretty fast when in between some German Krauts (*denies horrible joke to write a German word with a similar pronunciation as crowds*).

Yay! I have plans for learning German too, I just have to try to not postpone it too much.

For all you Deutsch speakers: how do you feel about Duolingo? I think it's helpful in learning vocabulary and such, but it refuses to provide me detailed explanations about cases and gender so I have to make flashcards to study on my own. It's not like there's a German language school nearby me (that's decently priced, anyway).

Ich weiß es nicht, ich kenne dieses Konzept nicht.



(Or English only here?)

Es ist gut. I understand what you wrote. But yeah I understand a good portion of people here don't really need duolingo as they aren't high school students on a tight budget (I want to surprise my parents so I'm not asking them for cash ) as I am.

Ich bin ein Berliner!

I am learning ASL and I'm loving it!

In high school, all the Boys were taking German and all the girls were taking French.

I'm no fool! I took French, even tho' I spoke a little German already

So, the girls in my French class come up and say, "So, Stuart, you're gay?"

Things didn't go as well as I planned.

That's something I learned already at a pretty young age. guys in girls dominated education/class > ''he has to be gay with a lot of girly friends''

As a Tri-languagal entity (German, Dutch, English), I can say that German is, well, boring. And the Articles are hell.