I mean I was planning to visit in the next couple of years anyway I guess…
nie.
please be advised that speaking german properly is super fucking hard compared to learning many other languages, and you don’t need german in germany for the most part.
when I’m in germany I speak my shitty, broken german and they respond to me in english
That’s when you double down and tell them in German that you don’t speak English. That’ll confuse 'em.
I, a white man, would love to learn to speak German with an Indian accent just to really fuck with 'em
I once asked a German guy in Germany if he spoke German. On accident. When I was trying to ask him if he spoke English.
Did he reply in German that he didn’t? :-)
My favorite phrase to use in all foreign countries is “Please forgive me, I am American.” It gets a laugh out of almost everyone even when terribly butchered in any language and most people will then attempt English for you.
Except Parisians, who do not care. I think they would prefer I point and grunt to trying either English or my awful French.
Compared to other languages… If those other languages are Romantic, North Germanic, Dutch, Afrikaans, or Frisian. A majority of other languages are typically considered more difficult for people who only speak English.
That being said, I found Russian way easier than German at first, but that quickly stops being the case… German shares a lot of semantic/syntactic similarities with English so you can reasonably assume that a lot of German constructions will easily translate to English, for Russian though it’s more unfamiliar and you have to put more effort into thinking Russian-y. The main thing that made German way harder at first is German declensions… ugh… Russian has a complex declension system but it’s extremely regular, while German declensions are pretty irregular and the declension of articles is especially bad because their forms overlap a lot. Adjective declension is similarly bad. German word order also fucked with me a lot but it’s decently rigid so you get it quickly.
