re: #362 stevemcg

Wally, I tried to learn German. Went pretty well. The vocabulary was okay and I was able to make out words when I would listen to a German speaker (as opposed to the Romance languages, where I can barely make out discrete words). What drove me crazy were the grammer rules. You have 6 words for “the” and another buch for “a”, all dependent on gender (which is not intuitive), case and number. Then, you have to put endings on all the adjectives, also with the same rules, the verbs have their own conjugation rules, and heaven help me with the word order. In English, it goes: I would have gone home first, but I stopped to eat. In German, it’s: I would home first gone have, but I to eat stopped. The grammer just drove me crazy.

So, what if someone said to you “Every sentence you utter sounds like a yak trying to clear phlegm from it’s throat.”

You’d have a ball with that statement, right?