German grammar has a pretty consistent pattern to it-- every sentence requires some of the basic information right up at the front, but it can get confusing for those who haven’t encountered the “let’s throw all the other verbs at the back of the sentence” bit or the “declining nouns help us understand how they’re functioning in relation to the rest of the words in the sentence” bit that makes the word order a little more flexible in German. I could see how native speakers of Romance languages would find it to be a little more difficult, as there’s more room for word order creativity, but the payoff for that is having to learn how to figure out context via properly conjugating verbs and declining nouns.
I took German at high school and college level, so I have a very basic understanding of conversational Hochdeutsch. What appears to make it difficult for many English speakers is the types of dipthongs one finds in German that is a bit more “subtle” than English; a slight change to the sound of a word can mean the difference between saying the weather is humid and saying the weather is homosexual. For English speakers who are not used to listening for these nuances, unused to gendering their nouns (and there’s three of them in German), and baffled by the concept of throwing verbs toward the polar ends of the sentence, it can be a little overwhelming. One thing that is helpful is that it is very similar grammatically to English if you happen to be somewhat eloquent in your use of English and are familiar with older uses of Modern English where we used more creative word order in a manner similar to German.
I was also fairly lucky when I took German that I had already had exposure to both French (via high school classes) and Icelandic (via being a passive bilingual at the time). I picked up on the grammar pretty quickly and the crossover vocabulary from both languages was helpful; the only problem I had in acquiring vocabulary is that words in Icelandic are often so similar to words in German that I’d occasionally confuse which language I was trying to parse as I was writing or attempting to speak.
Once you’ve learned about 10 languages from different families, the rest become way easier to study after that. The reason is the underlying deep structure and processes of phonological changes that are shared in common by all human spoken languages. When you’ve become familiar with such universal patterns repeating over and over everywhere you look, your mind recognizes them so much more quickly. Study of historical and comparative linguistics will augment this learning process considerably.
Incidentally, other European languages of non-Indo-European families that no one has mentioned yet include
Finnic: Ingrian, Karelian, Komi, Mari, Mordvin, and Veps;
Mongolic: Kalmyk;
North Caucasian: Adyge, Andi, Avar, Chechen, Dargin, Ingush, Kabardian, Lak, and Lezgian;
Turkic: Bashkir, Chuvash, Gagauz, Kazakh, Kumyk, Nogai, Tatar, and Turkish.
Except for Gagauz (Romania), Kazakh (Kazakhstan), and Turkish (Turkey), all of the above are spoken in the European part of Russia. Russia also has Iranian languages including Ossetic and Tat.
One of the things I’m saying is that the grammar was very much not difficult. We already were familiar with declension from Latin (and Basque, in my case: I don’t speak Basque but I know how to form its genitive); with different word orders from Latin and English; with similar-yet-unequal prepositions from every language we spoke or had previously studied… All of us had a minumum of 10 years of English or French, at least one year of Latin; we were bilingual or at least one-and-a-half-lingual Spanish/Catalan. But the courses were not designed to take advantage of this, and the native teachers usually were native but were not teachers.
The teachers kept harping on dativ and akusativ. We know that, now teach us how to say “green beans”! “Salad” (not just “tomato”), “grated cheese” (not just “cheese”), “melted cheese” (see before), different kinds of meat (not just “meat”), und so weise.
What makes a language easy or difficult to learn comes down to a few factors:
How close it is to a language you speak in grammar, vocabulary, phonology, and other linguistic factors. English, Dutch, and Icelandic are all Germanic languages, but English and Dutch are closer to each other than either is to Icelandic. These are things that can be objectively measured. I’ve heard that Italian is the easiest Romance language for English speakers because the sounds of Italian are easier than the sounds of French, Romanian, or Portuguese, while the grammar and vocabulary are a little closer to English than those of Spanish.
How much exposure you have to a language. English is omnipresent in Western Europe, even if you aren’t studying it, so you get some exposure, both oral and written. That’s less true outside of Europe, especially outside of tourist areas and certain domains like international business.
The teachers and textbooks and other resources you have. Not all “learn English” books are created equal. I have no problem believing that Arabic and Chinese textbook writers use different strategies with different concentrations.
If you’re learning a new language, your age would make a difference, too. Of course, really young kids have the easiest time of it. I think I was better at picking up new sounds in French when I was in middle school than I am at it in Hebrew now. One big difference is, I’m more than 20 years older now. I’ve heard plenty of stories about families moving to a country that speaks a different language, and the kids end up with less of an accent than the adults once they learn the new language.
When I converted to Judaism (starting around age 24), I tried to learn Hebrew, or at least the ability to sound out Hebrew words. The “ch” sound was really hard for me. Not too surprising, since it doesn’t occur in my dialect of English. 13 years later, I think I get it right or almost right about 75% of the time when I try to say it.
I wonder, if you learn a second language early (say, early elementary school), does that make it easier to pick up a third language later in life? Most of us in the US do not learn a second language before middle school, and I wonder if this handicaps us later on.
People who learned a language as a second language very often become the best teachers of that second language. Its native speakers never needed to reflect much on how it works; since they grew up with it, it just is that way; they probably don’t even know how. But a scholar who makes it a field of study, especially as a second language, has to learn all about how it works, and is better equipped to explain it to other students. Knowing which parts might be harder for them and need good explanations, for example.
For another example, no grammars of the Arabic language were written until the Persians began studying it in depth during the early Islamic period. All the earliest grammars were written by Persians who learned it as a second language. The Arabs themselves never felt they needed grammars to speak their own mother tongue.
I don’t know if amalgam is the right term; English isn’t like some sort of weird Old English / French / Old Norse creole, but instead a firmly West Germanic language with a ridiculous number of Norman French and Old Norse loanwords and phrases.
From what I understand, as a native English speaker, Dutch would probably be the easiest language for me to learn, being the closest modern relative.
Amalgam isn’t a technical term, like creole, and linguists have concluded that English is not a creole. I think “amalgam” is a good lay descriptor.
Dutch is the language most closely related, historically, but we’ve borrowed so many French/Romance language terms that it’s hard to say which would be easier to learn.
The Germanic words in English tend to be the everyday sort of words (hand, man, and), but a lot of those words, like “and”, aren’t the ones that convey the most information in a given sentence. Often, it’s the romance derived words that pack the punch.
Yes. In addition to the Germanic and Romance languages, you have the Slavic languages (e.g. Russian, Ukrainian, and Czech), Celtic languages (e.g. Irish, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic), the Greek language. There are also Indo-European languages not from Europe, such as Indo-Iranian languages (e.g. Farsi), and many of the languages of India.
In a real sense, English is closer historically to Hindi and Urdu than it is to Finnish, which isn’t even an Indo-European language at all. If you look at the basic structure of the language you can see similarities, even if you don’t speak the language. Take a look at a phonetic transcription of Hindi and see that it sounds vaguely European, even if you can’t understand it. Now look at Finnish, which, to my Indo-European accustomed taste, looks completely bizarre.