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German vs. French | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Monte Cristo Newbie United States Joined 5182 days ago 26 posts - 37 votes Speaks: English* | Message 17 of 19 10 October 2010 at 7:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have studied both languages and I considered German a lot harder than French.
*German pronunciation is not so much more easier than French; I always found German umlauts very tricky to pronounce. People consider the French R very hard to pronounce but guess what... the German R is exactly the same as the French R. All-in-all I suppose French is a little more difficult to pronounce and understand orally, but it's not that big of a deal. *French sentence construction is basically identical to English. Whereas in German... long sentences are basically a nightmare. German is SOV (unless there is only one verb in the sentence then it is SVO) whereas French/English are both SVO. The German cases is something that English and French have nothing in common with. Look at a German case chart and you'll see how difficult it is. French has 15 verb tenses/moods but 4 of those are strictly literary *With vocabulary you'll get thousands of words for free with French: remarquable, nécessaire, etc. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| John Smith Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Australia Joined 6043 days ago 396 posts - 542 votes  Speaks: English*, Czech*, Spanish Studies: German | Message 18 of 19 13 October 2010 at 8:56am | IP Logged | ||
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French = Easy when you start......... Harder as you go along
German = Hard when you start..........Easier as you go along The reason why German is easier in the long term in my opiniion is because it is much closer to English. For exmaple, German only really has one past tense. When you learn French you will have to wrap your head around completely new concepts. Like a past tense that does not exist in English.
French sentence construction is basically identical to English ^^ Your French must be very poor if you think that! Edited by John Smith on 13 October 2010 at 8:58am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5767 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 19 of 19 13 October 2010 at 1:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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*Phonology
French: Plosives are not aspirated Liaision and elision Nasal vowels German: Initial S and S between vowels is voiced, voiceless in all other positions Final voiced consonants are devoiced (this used to be a feature of English as well, so it shouldn't be too difficult to learn) Consonant clusters Glottal stop before initial vowels for all words (English has it only for entire phrases) German has a phonemic distinction between /r/ and /x/, which are allophones in French depending on dialect (and don't exist in most English varieties) Qualitative distinction between long and short vowels (in cognates long vowels usually correspond to diphtongs in English) Vowelized /r/ (well, you have that too) Both languages have some consonants and a number of vowels that are alien to native English speakers. I would however argue that German pronunciation should be easier to learn for a native English speaker because German has much less sandhi than French. *Orthography German wins, hands down. Even though you might know the spelling of some words (ignoring the accents) - the ratio of phoneme-to-letter-combination and letter-combination-to-phoneme in French is almost as bad as it is in English. *Grammar Verbs French has more irregular verbs than German, both have more than English. As opposed to English, the German way of building compound verbs can still be considered productive. German uses almost exclusively adverbial complements or lexical aspect to deal with aspect, we don't even have a real continuous aspect like English does French has a perfective/imperfective distinction German conditional mood is a bit more complex than English (one of my pitfalls in English, really), yet much simpler than French German has the weird habit of putting the second half of a compound verb form after the accompanying object clauses, as well as ending some subordinate clauses with the verbs. (It still is SVO, that you very much. It's also worse in literature than in colloquial -even high register colloquial- speech.) Nouns French compound nouns/expressions are more analytical than English, German compound nouns are more synthetical. Can't see that either should be difficult, unless you're scared of words like 'bagpipe' or 'bag of crisps'. German has a moderately complex/irregular case system. (No idea how difficult it is for foreigners) French has irregular plural forms. Adjectives German doesn't mark adjectives that are used as adverbs, but differentiates between predicative and attributive usage (more or less). French puts most adjective behind the noun, yet some before. It also has irregular adjectives. Pronouns French has direct and indirect object pronouns. I think I've said enough. *Word order French has a more fixed word order, which might be more comfortable for a native English speaker. *Vocabulary Either language has a lot of cognates and old loanwords with and from English, each other and Latin. There also are a lot of false friends and words that are used just how you wouldn't have expected. Some of the things I've mentioned will be easier for somebody knowing Spanish/Italian/Portuguese. Others won't. There's probably a lot I have forgotten or just don't know. Edited by Bao on 13 October 2010 at 10:55pm 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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