German is HARD! I don't like the language, how do I still learn German?
- Surenthar Manoharan
- Mar 26
- 4 min read
Deutsch ist schwer! Seriously how do you find the motivation and courage to learn the langauge?
I mean I can't sugercoat this fact either, especially for someone coming from various langauge background such as English, Malay, Spanish, Japanese and Tamil. There are number of grammer stuff that makes the langauge really hard compared to English, or even to other langauges. In such hardships with the langauge, does the solution exists? If so, how do you go about mastering them???
I mean this is what I can outline, the following diffulculties I have faced numerous time when learning the language, and how I dealt with them
Der, Die, Das
In English you have just one type of 'the', where it's applicable for all nouns, and in other langauges like French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese you have 2 types of 'the' which is masculine and feminimum, with masculine form being applied to most of the nouns. But in German you have pretty much 3 types, which are masculine, femininum and neutrum. There's no explanation given to why an object got to be male or female, it is what it is! There are still couple of tips & hints on mastering this part😀
i) deklanation/endings of each nouns - The following picture can be used as a formula to figure out the type of article that a noun belongs to
ii) wordplay apps - Most of the noun that we learn in German, typically we ignore their appropriate article, as its much easier to learn just the noun itself. Nevertheless, that will become a big issue should we ignore that. Couple of apps that I can highly recommend here are the following: Drops, WordPlay, Anki App
Nominativ, Akkusativ, Dativ
This issue was much of a problem, as it doen't make much sense when explained all in German, saying that Nominativ is the 'Subjekt', Akkusativ being 'direkte Objekt' and Dativ being the 'indirekte Objekt'. This explanations really explain the sophisticated thinking of Germans 😖
Here's my explanation in plain simple English on understanding how they work, esp. with 'Akkusativ' and 'Dativ'.
Who's 'verb'ing --> Nominativ
(Nominativ) verbing what/who --> Akkusativ
(Nominativ) verbing to what/who --> Dativ
Preposition
If you learn all of the preposition in one go, you'll probably feel like travelling to hell back & forth👹😅. Coz one preposition can be used for various situations, z.B. von, in, an, aus... And on top of that, you got mixed prepositions (Prepositions for both Akkusatives & Datives) the true killer part of the German language😱
Best way to grasp thouroughly on this part is to break them down into these 4 types, and you pretty much learn them from one type of preposition to another.
In the beginning at A1/A2-level you should just know the Prepositions of time (temporale Präpositionen) and Prepositions of place (lokale Präpositionen). And later gradually you learn the Prepositions of manner (modalen Präpositionen) and finally the C1 level preposition, which is the Causal prepositions (kausale Präpositionen).
Sentence structure
Sometimes when we learn a langauge, we very literally translate each single word one-to-one, keeping the sentence structure exactly the same in German, thinking that it's all good to do so. Problem solved?
Some of the non-native speakers consider this not much of an issue, but to be honest it really differentiate someone who's just learning for the sake of simply wanting to deliver a point and someone who trully want to communicate and get comfortable with German speakers, whether with native speakers or non-native speakers.
Main thing to bear in mind with the German sentence structure are these 3 things
i) For 1 sentence only, ''verb'' is always at the SECOND POSITION
ii) For 1 sentence only, ''time'' is either in FIRST or THIRD POSITION (u can put it in 4th position, but if you have trouble with the positioning, my suggestion is that u keep them in 1st or 3rd position).
iii) For 2 or more sentences, the verb positions vary depending on the 'Conjunctions' you are using
When you are first learning German or even halfway learning the language, do keep in m indpoint (i) and (ii) very seriously, because this makes all the difference is someone is talking properly or if somone is talking a broken German.
Reflexiv verbs
The final part of the German langauge that makes you wonder if you should bother taking this seriously😶🌫️😶🫥 Reflexiv verb doesn't exist in English, and in Roman langauges like Spanish or Italian, you do seem them on simple terms. However mit German language you have the combination of some verbs being akkusativ or dativ, and some of these reflexive vebrs havong prepositions with them(plus akkusativ or dativ on top of that), and if you used any this reflexive verb worngly, you may end up saying or meaning something different from you are really trying to say.
I know at this point you feel like you just wanna give up trying to learn this language alltogether, but seriously tho there's a trick you can use to master this part here.
For one, learn by level basis. Learn pretty much 5-10 reflixve verbs every month by each level, just the ones that are used on daily practice, not the one that yo barely hear lol.
And for the part where there;s preposition comes with it, try to shove the word da- behind each of the prepositions. For example...
On top of all this, the main thing that stops someone end of the day in mastering the langauge in the way the look at this problem. I have seen people struglling up to 3 or even 5 years trying to reach B1 level! And when I speak with them, I can see obviously see these words screaming from their face, whether verbarlly or even visibly: it's either ''I HATE GERMAN VERY MUCH'' or ''GERMAN IS F***ING HARD''
How do you overcome this mentality you may ask...? Check out my next blog on ways to tricking yourself into liking it.
Dropping soon on 1st of April (And no I'm not going to April Fooling LOL, its the exact opposite😄)
Comments