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Rhoderick t1_jdv19np wrote

Reply to comment by AthiestMessiah in Germany is overhauling its immigration rules to bolster a rapidly shrinking workforce by yash13

Honestly, if you're looking to learn German, starting from knowing English is pretty much the best position you can be in, short of knowing Dutch or something.

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bonyponyride t1_jdv28oj wrote

Trennbar verbs, reflexive verbs, gendered nouns, and verb cases have entered the chat. It does have quite a few similarities to english, but I've found people who speak Russian and Ukrainian pick it up way faster than others.

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AwfulUsername123 t1_jdv3sve wrote

You mean noun cases. And yeah, English speakers struggle with that. See: whom.

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AmargithHuld t1_jdx4gs4 wrote

The older gen in those countries had german as a second language in school, that helps as well.

But sure, cases throw many for a loop.

I can attest, however, that Russian ‘thinks’ in a very different way than germanic european languages, and they struggle very much with articles, wordplacement (as they have cases for that shit) and the idea of auxiliary verbs.

Source: lived there for a year, and soeak Russian and several germanic languages :)

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bonyponyride t1_jdx9w2f wrote

Ah interesting. Maybe that's the reason. I've been taking German classes in Germany with a few Russians and many Ukrainians, and they've always been at the top of the class. Some of them finished B1 in just 7 months, which is crazy to me. It took me 10 months of full time classes and I still fuck up all the cases and have a smaller vocabulary that I can use off the top of my head.

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