One of the most confusing things about me is that I suck at English (writing this article with Grammarly), but I am excellent at German. People say it is because English is taught differently than modern foreign languages in schools. Still, I have noticed a few other discrepancies between the two languages that may explain this weirdness!
First of all, German is much more phonetic than English. In other words, German words sound exactly like how they are written, whereas English has silent letters and homophones. The German term for the art of taking photos is Fotografie, which sounds exactly how it looks, unlike the English term photography, which has not one but two silent ph’s! Similarly, hearing the question “Which witch is which?” in English can be very confusing since the words “which” and “witch” sound identical. However, the German equalivent “welche Hexe ist welche?” clearly distinguishes the question word from the noun, limiting the need for the hearer to visualise the sentence in their head.
Although German spelling is reasonably straightforward, one has to be aware of umlauts, which are two dots which can appear on the top of the vowel in a German word, which not only alter the pronunciation of the word but also the meaning. An example of this, which always makes me stop and think for a second, is hatten and hätten. Although they are technically spelt the same, hatten means “had”, and it is pronounced how it looks. However, hätten with an umlaut means “would have”, and it is pronounced “hehtten”…all because of 2 dots!
One of my favourite things in German is that you can express almost an entire English sentence in one or two words. For example, Katzenpfotenballenhimbeermarmeladenglastunker means “cat’s paw pads dipped into a pot of raspberry jam”! The long words can put learners off the language, but it comes in handy for two main reasons. Firstly, beginners can express complex ideas without worrying too much about sentence structure. Additionally, students can express complex ideas in an essay while keeping the word count down!
Another interesting point to note is that English has two present tenses, meaning that the sentences “I dance” and “I am dancing” carry separate meanings. However, the German sentence “ich tanze” can mean both of these things and if you want to be extra precise, you can add a time phrase, for example, “ich tanze jetzt” means “I’m dancing now” and “ich tanze montags” means “I dance on Mondays”. So, it could be argued that there is one less tense to learn in German than in English.
However, there is one more letter in the German alphabet! ß, not to be confused with B, is called a “scharfes S” and makes a ss sound. About 20 years ago, there was a spelling reform in Germany, and most of the ß’s were removed and replaced with a double s, except a few words like heißen (to be called) and a certain German swear word! I find that one benefit of having such a unique letter is that the ß makes words memorable. In other words, because ß is not in the English alphabet, you tend to remember how to spell words that contain the letter.
The final issue that I’m going to discuss is cases. In German, cases allow the word order in a sentence to be much more flexible than in English. For example, there is only one way to say “The dog bites the man” in English because changing the word order would change the sentence’s meaning: “The man bites the dog”. However, thanks to the cases of the German language, both the sentences “der Hund beißt den Mann” and “den Mann beißt der Hund” convey the same message of a man being bitten by a dog because “der” is the word for “the” in the nominative case which is used for the subject of the sentence, whereas “den” is the word for “the” in the accusative case which deals with the (direct) object of the sentence, so, although this sounds a bit technical, it means that when German words jump around the page, I still know what is happening to what!
In conclusion, although English is traditionally taught differently from modern languages in educational institutions, it could be argued that German, despite being quite notorious for having complicated grammar, is a generally more user-friendly language. It indeed takes a bit of work to memorise all the grammar rules in the German language, but it has fewer exceptions to its rules than English. Currently, in Scotland, there is a lot of stigma surrounding learning German, and because of this, German teachers are dramatically rare. This means that not every school offers the language. I think that if we break the stigma, then there will be more demand for German classes, and eventually, the number of German teachers will equal the number of French and Spanish teachers in Scotland. This will, in turn, decrease the pressure on the existing German teachers in the country!
If a non-verbal kid who sucks at English can fall in love with the German language and succeed this highly in it, then indeed, anyone can.
eemmcg04💜
The Non Verbal Linguist 