Europe

Knowing German can give you a competitive edge with employers and even boost your salary prospects.

Wo mein geld?

This article seems to be targeted at brits but nevertheless, learning languages is good for many reasons. It's also fun as long as it's not something that happens under pressure.

I did it as a toddler, how hard could it be for adults?

German and English both belong to the Germanic language family and have a shared history. This means that there are many “cognates” (words that are historically related and therefore similar). These are often easy to guess for English speakers, particularly once you are familiar with some of the patterns.

However, my experience of teaching German at British universities has shown me that German is much more accessible to English speakers than some might think.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisian_languages

The Frisian languages are the closest living language group to the Anglic languages; the two groups make up the Anglo-Frisian languages group and together with the Low German dialects these form the North Sea Germanic languages.

I bet West Frisian's easier!

EDIT:

https://old.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/6k4a5k/has_anyone_really_learned_frisian_because_it_was/djj8q0o/

Has anyone really learned Frisian because it was the closest to english?

Not exactly what you're asking for, but actor/comedian Eddie Izzard, who had studied Old English, decided to find out whether Old English and Frisian were as close as linguists said they were. He went to an area where Frisian was spoken and tried to negotiate the purchase of a brown cow, speaking Old English to a farmer who spoke only Frisian. Here's the video; it's pretty entertaining if you're into languages.

as someone who only speaks German and English, this is fucking hilarious.

As someone learning German right now, I guess it's hard to argue with relative terms but I find the German language to be built with a ton of traps and abnormalities for seemingly no explicable reason.

For instance we conjugate every verb but we maintain the subject, unlike in Spanish where we would conjugate and drop the subject. I don't see any reason why we would do that except to make the language less efficient and more obtuse.

That being said, it hasn't been too hard and I agree with the general sentiment that learning any language is a good hobby to have so I don't want to discourage anyone.

The irony is not lost on me, in this current timeline...

I never tried to learn German but if you spend some time in Germany, you just start to make sense of the words after a bit because it's so close to English. If it weren't for all the damn Germans trying to practice their English on me, I'd probably have gotten reasonably fluent in a couple months.

As a German, I have to say learning the grammar is pretty fucking hard. Especially the four cases. It took me years to get it right with few mistakes and I am a native. Sure compared to some Slavic languages, Hungarian, Gaelic and Chinese languages it isn't that bad. However it is a lot harder than English, Dutch or Romance languages.

German has the cool feature of just cramming a bunch of words together to make a new word. That's about the only thing I know about it as someone who's just interested in language as a concept.

For people interested in language who speak English, I will recommend this book, which kinda blew my mind explaining why my native tongue is so stupid for good reasons:

Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don't Rhyme and Other Oddities of the English Language

Counterpoint: Three genders.