Anybody here who has German has your first language?

[raccoon]

If so, did you think English was easy or hard to learn?

[Blue_Tires]

1. send a PM to MissHoneyChurch

who has probably left for the day and will return tomorrow

[raccoon]

2. thanks for the heads up. Will do. nt

[MissHoneychurch]

3. When I learned it in school

it was hard, I am not good at learning vocabulary and trying to speak in no real situations. Then I went to the U.S. for year and was forced to speak the language. That is when I really learned.

[DFW]

4. My wife says basically the same thing as Miss Honey church

She says the hardest thing about English is to know what preposition to use in any given situation.
Otherwise, it wasn't overly complicated except for fine points and fancy words that have French/Latin
origins as opposed to the simpler words that have Germanic origins.

They find our spelling a nightmare, too (like us trying to learn to spell French), since German is basically phonetic.*

As an English native speaker who learned Swedish first, I found German relatively easy except for all of
those gender-specific articles. Even today after 35 years with my wife, I make mistakes with them, and
we've spoken German with each other ever since we met. Swedish is far easier than German to learn, but
ever so slightly more limited in where you can use it.

*on edit:
They like the example we learn in first grade: ghoti. What's a ghoti? take the "gh" from "enough," the "o" from
"women," and the "ti" from "nation," and ghoti is pronounced: "FISH."

[LeftOfSelf-Centered]

5. English came fairly easy to me...

I grew up bilingual Italian/German in Austria. I started learning English in school when I was 10 and immediately took a liking to it and so I worked at it. I watched a lot of movies in English and I read my first book in English when I was about 13 (Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy). From then on I did all my non-school reading in English.

Of course then I spent 8 years in the US in college and grad school. :)

To this day I still consider English the language I know best, even though I don't get to use it much anymore.

[Call Me Wesley]

7. Hey, nice to see ya!

:hi:

[LeftOfSelf-Centered]

8. Nice to see you too!

:hi:

I'm not around as much as I'd like, but this German thread caught my eye... :)

[Call Me Wesley]

6. I would call it 'mediocre.'

I still mess some words up and sometimes use German sentence structure, but I found English quite easy to learn. Of course, having an American wife improved my grasp, since we mainly talk English here. But yes, I still make mistakes or use the wrong words (sometimes I use them because they sound good, but make no sense in context.)

[GermanDem]

9. German native speaker

I am German, and started to learn English in school in 5th grade back in Germany. It was easy for me, but languages come easy to me anyway. English grammar is way easier than German grammar!

[spinbaby]

10. Me

But I started to learn English in kindergarten, so I don't think that counts. I'm mostly English now. The "th" sound was terribly hard for me.

[no_hypocrisy]

11. Story about my SO

He grew up in a household where only German was spoken in New Jersey. Both his parents came from Germany.

He went to Kindergarten, could speak English somewhat (television got him started and "going out") but the teacher couldn't understand him because of his thick accent. She tactfully advised his mother to start speaking more English at home. He didn't have to give up German and even was in the German Club in high school.

He had no problem improving his English language skills. Today he has no accent and also speaks fluent German.