Is German really that hard?
Compared to English, German has a lot of grammatical concepts that don’t exist at all in English, which makes it seem hard at the beginning. According to the Foreign Service Institut, German is in Category 2 of total 5 difficulty categories (https://effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/language-difficulty/). Sure, it is not as easy as French, Dutch, or Norwegian, but level 2 should not be that hard either, right?
German people themselves are pretty convinced that German language is a pretty hard language. They even have the saying “Deutsche Sprache, schwere Sprache” which translates to “German language, difficult language”. Unfortunately, German is also notorious for being a language with rough sounds, which makes it even more scary to learn.
In this article, I want to explain some aspects that I think contribute to why people think that German is hard. Most of them are grammatical aspects that don’t exist in English.
The grammatical gender
The grammatical gender. If you are unfamiliar with any other European languages apart from English, you might find this one confusing. In German, every single noun has a gender and not only people or animals. So it means a table has a gender, a bed has a gender, a film has a gender, and so on. In German, there are 3 genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter.
The way people can know the gender of a noun is from the article (or the word “the” in English). To say “the” in German, you have several words depending on the gender of the noun: “der” is for masculine nouns, “die” for feminine, and “das” for neuter. It doesn’t have anything to do with real gender, except maybe for professions, for example der Student (male student), die Studentin (female student), der Lehrer (male teacher), die Lehrerin (female teacher). This gender system works for all nouns, so, not only on professions, but also things, so for example: der Tisch means the table, die Tasse means the cup, das Buch means the book.
For plural, everything becomes “die”. Der Tisch becomes die Tische, die Tasse becomes die Tassen, das Buch becomes die Bücher.
What you need to pay attention is: don’t make it paralyse you. Learning gender is a life long process. Even after 5 years of living here, I still don’t know the gender of many nouns, you just need a dictionary every time. Every time you check the dictionary, check the gender, and also the plural form, because as you’ve noticed from the examples, the plural of a noun is not always with -s at the end like almost every noun in English.
Declension
Also different from English, nouns in German are declined, which means the form changes depending on its role in a sentence. There are four different cases in German which are called nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive. Those are the official terms, but you can consider them as subject, direct object, indirect object, and possession.
Going back to the word “der”, “die”, “das”, these little words (articles) change form when they are in different position. “der”, “die”, and “das” are actually the words in nominative case. Let’s first take a look at an example:
A masculine noun will have ”der” as subject, but it will change to “den” as a direct object. Example:
The dog eats = der Hund isst. I see the dog = Ich sehe den Hund.
In the first sentence, “the dog” is the subject, it is the one doing an action. So it will take the nominative case, and use the word “der”, since a dog is masculine in German. In the second sentence, “the dog” is not a subject, but an object. A masculine direct object uses the article “den”, so in this case we say “den Hund”.
Another example:
I give the dog a toy = Ich gebe dem Hund ein Spielzeug.
Here “the dog” is the indirect object of the sentence, while “a toy” is the direct object. Since the dog is the indirect object (dative case), the article for it will be “dem”.
Last example:
The house of the dog is small = Das Haus des Hundes ist klein.
Now, the dog is in possessive: the dog has something. This is the genitive case, and the article for masculine genitive case is “des”.
These rules apply to feminine, neuter, and plural nouns as well, so in the end you will have a 4 by 4 table for the articles.
Although there are 16 entries, a lot of them are actually the same words, for example the nominative and the accusative for feminine noun are the same “die”. In the end, there are only 6 words to remember: der, die, das, den, dem, des.
Conjugation
Just like in English, you have to change the form of the verb depending on the time, like present tense, past tense, future tense, conditional, etc. Of course, there is also regular and irregular verbs just like go - went - gone, drink - drank - drunk, those irregularities exist also in German. So if you know English, that concept is nothing new for you.
The difference of English and German, is that the verb form changes for every subject. So you have in general 6 types of subject: first person, second person, and third person, both singular and plural. If you are not familiar with the terms, it means:
I,
you (singular),
he/she/it,
we,
you (plural) or you all,
they.
For example the verb to drive in present tense, in English you’ll have:
I drive,
you drive,
he/she/it drives,
we drive,
y’all drive,
they drive.
In German, you’d have the infinitive (fahren) and the conjugation in present tense is:
ich fahre,
du fährst,
er/sie/es fährt,
wir fahren,
ihr fahrt,
sie fahren.
The good thing is: the infinitive of all german verbs always end with -n, and the conjugation for wir, and sie (in the sense of they) are always the same. For present tense, the conjugation for wir and sie is exactly the same as the infinitive. The conjugations for ich and ihr are pretty regular too! You drop the -n and add -e for ich, or add -t for ihr. The conjugations for du and er/sie/es are the most irregular, but they are pretty easy too, you just need to get used to it.
Verb position
This part is one of the most frustrating one, I think. So you know in English you always have subject and then verb and the object, and you can put adverbs (like adverb of place, time, manner, etc) pretty much anywhere you want? So you can say:
I read the newspaper every morning in the office.
I read the newspaper in the office every morning.
If you want to emphasise the adverb of time, you can say:
Every morning I read the newspaper in the office.
But you can’t for example say:
The newspaper read I every morning in the office.
In German it is pretty different. Somehow, verb is the king in German and it loves to take a certain position. In a normal sentence, the verb takes the second position, the other elements of the sentence can be anywhere, the king doesn’t care. So for example:
Ich lese die Zeitung jeden morgen im Büro.
If you want to emphasise the adverb of time, you can put it in front, but the verb will still be in second position:
Heute morgen lese ich die Zeitung im Büro.
You can even put the emphasis on the object and put it in front, which would sound so weird in English:
Die Zeitung lese ich im Büro.
It gets even weirder when you have at least two components of the verb, for example:
I have eaten a sandwich this morning.
Ich habe ein Brötchen heute morgen gegessen.
(I have a sandwich this morning eaten).
It gets even more complicated when you have a main clause and a subordinate clause.
Es wäre besser gewesen, wenn du die Arbeit gestern vorbereitet hättest.
It would have been better if you had prepared the work yesterday.
Separable verbs
Trennbare Verben or separable verbs are another nightmare for me. So you know in English, a preposition can change the meaning of a verb, just like to give is different from to give up? German takes it to the next level, or more like.. English makes it simpler.
In German, you have sooo many different short words that can change the meaning of a verb:
sagen = to say
absagen = to cancel
versagen = to fail
aussagen = to testify
untersagen = to forbid
zusagen = to agree (with)
And when you make a sentence out of it, you need to sometimes separate the preposition and put it at the end of the sentence. So for example you say:
Ich sage
Ich sage ab. Ich sage das Meeting ab.
Die Lehrerin untersagt den Schülern, im Unterricht zu essen.
To help you with this separable verbs, I put here two links:
https://www.verblisten.de/
https://www.youtube.com/@deutschmitrieke
With the first link, you can check all of the possible verbs that come from one root verb, for example sagen. The second link is a YouTube link of a German teacher called Rieke, she teaches German mainly for intermediate and advanced levels, but she has a lot of videos breaking down separable verbs with the same root verbs, and it has been pretty helpful for me, so I hope you’ll find it helpful too.
That’s all for today’s article. I might want to discuss a little bit more of every difficult aspect that I mentioned here, maybe one post for every aspect, and I will post it soon.
