When I was in public school, I had some English teachers who couldn't speak English. They actually knew less than me.... and they always spoke saxon-english, that sounded like "äh .. hello .. äh ... I äm se best englisch lehrer of se earth"
+SwatTeamExit Sounds like my last englisch teacher. Sometimes if anyone gives him an answear He said:" ok what does ... mean? Because ....The other students don't know." (but everyone knew the meaning, whithout him)
Hey Dana, I am a fellow adventurer like you and I found the video very insightful. I will be travelling to Germany in a few months, and I am highly interested in teaching English there when I go. Thanks for these videos, they're very helpful. I look forward to the follow-up video. Cheers!
English was pretty easy to learn. Then again my parents made sure I learned both English & Spanish when I started talking so I guess I never really had a hard time with the language. Only time I hard problems was writing in Spanish since it has accents but it gets easy as long as you know the rules.
Alexandra Garcia My husband and I plan the same thing with our children. Teaching them both Dutch (our mother tongue) and English from the start. Especially since English is spoken in so many countries these days! Do you find it helpful to speak both?
As a German I would say that English ist probably the easiest language to learn of all , because they're so similar and the grammar is not so complicated.
at school i learn englisch and french and i must admit that i have BIG problems with grammar in every language... so as french has a very complicated grammar, i just hate learning it, especially in comparison to english. i love english sooo much, it just sounds great, has easy grammar and is pretty useful too. i would also say that learning english as a german seems loads easier than learning german as an nglish speaking person
why english is hard: the exemptions-there is a rule, and there are a whole bunch of exemptions which you have to memorize. writing vs pronunciation- depending on where the word comes from (celtic, latin, germanic, norse or french) it is different how you write down the same sound(as opposed to german or hungarian, where you have letters or specific digraphs assigned to each sound, and you simply write down what you hear) why it is easy: it is everywhere, you can just absorb it. The language is still in an early stage of development, and so grammar is not complicated as opposed to -again- german or hungarian or russian.
You've got it exactly the opposite of what's really going on. It's not in an early stage of development it's in a late stage of development. It's as old as German (which it has to be since they both came from the same root). English used to have all those grammatical features that other languages have but they were later dropped and the language was simplified. We decided we no longer needed those things. Similarly, Spanish and other Romance languages have simplified Latin grammar.
It's Romanic languages, not Romance languages. These languages have nothing to do with romantic novels, even though a lot of well known writers of that genre come from Spain :D
Hmm, ok my dictionary says the english equivalent for German word Romanisch is romanic. While romance is the equivalent to german Romanze -> a love experience
Yes, the word romance has dual uses and does mean that second definition also. There is a category in literature called romance novels, which definitely has that meaning. But, for whatever reason, it is also used to describe the family of languages descended from Latin.
Hey Dana, as a native german speaker I never really thought about the german language. When I started learning French a few years ago I realised that I didn't think about the English language as well. I started learning English at age 8 or 9 I guess. And now I'm 19. So I think it really depends at what age you start learning a foreign language. If I started learning French 10 years ago, I surely would be as "fluent" as I'm now in English.
i learn english at school and think it's not that hard to learn, i think it's way easier than learning german and i like learning english way more than learning spanish and latin
Easy to start with since it has strong tendencies of an isolating language, like Chinesese, and thus lacks a huge amount of the inflexions but when it goes into the depts of it, it can become quite hard for the syntax is quite strict.
+bluerisk I agree. I do not think you can make the general assumption that language X is easier/not as easy to learn as language Y. It is a fact that English is a highly analytic language, i.e. meaning is determined by word order rather that inflection, as is the case with laguages such as Latin, a highly synthetic language where inflections define meaning ang the word order is almost arbitrary (there is, however, a usual word order in prose: SOV). Ever since the Old English times, the variety of inflections has been decreasing. Germans can probably learn English easier than other languages because English and German are both Germanic languages and thus related.
I think english is rather easy to learn. Not to learn that good that you're perfect or sound as if you were a native speaker, but to learn it to a certain point from which on people will understand you, no matter how many mistakes you make. But I can only compare it to latin and spanish, so maybe I just picked very hard languages to learn, I don't know. The only thing, I will never be able to understand are the rules when it comes to using 'if'. There was a time when I avoided it, using whether whenever I could. But now I just try to listen to my stomach (do english speaking people also have something like a stomach feeling, telling you what to do?) and hope, I'm right. I actually listen to my stomach in both english and german, as I was never able to remember grammar rules but without being able to explain it, I was usually right with my 'creations'. Maybe that's what I like about english so much, my stomach speaks english as well. It never knew any good advice in spanish or latin. :D
Birgit Schwäbe I definitely listen to my stomach while speaking German! And when speaking English it's just what comes naturally. Although, when I started teaching English, I realized a couple things I'd been saying were technically wrong, so I tried to correct them... at least for the sake of my students! Speaking of "when" versus "if," I learned this was tricky for German speakers when I first started dating Mr. German Man. We were out one night and he said something to me like "If we get home, we should order a pizza," or something like that, and I got very alarmed! I was like, IF?!! Why is us getting home an IF? "If" means that it might not happen! Like if you're caught in a horrible storm and you think you might die you'd say, "IF we get home..." but not on a normal night :D So in this case, it should have been "When we get home, we should order a pizza."
Well, I would have been very alarmed in that moment as well :D. But the meaning of if is not the main problem of us germans, I think, but which 'time' you use for the verbs in the half sentence with and the other one without the if. That is really really confusing.
Birgit Schwäbe Aaah yes. I understand. Yeah, I can see how that could be confusing. There are definitely some German grammatical constructions I struggle with in the same way! I feel your pain :)
Thx for your videos. It's always fun watching them. Especially as I live in Munich too. I do not speak so many languages, so I can hardly answer your question. The only other language I really learned is Latin (English from the 5th grade till the Abitur (Leistungskurs Englisch), and Latin from the 7th grade till the 11th). Then a view words in Thai, and some more in Elvish (but that does not count. I think English is relatively easy to learn as it is in many ways similar to German (like the same language group or whatever you call it). I can read an unknown English text with many words I don't know and still comprehend what is about and really understanding it and not having to look up the words. And then I can have an Latin text and having no clue what it says at all. You easily understand I was not very good in that language... at least in the end. You read the text and you have to figure out what are the verbs, what are the nouns... and what conjugation and declaration the words have... Not sure if I come across... But it is nice to listen to the observations of a foreigner who lives in Germany. It shows me things I never realized about Germany as it was "normal" to me as I grew up with it... And I did not live long enough in other countries to really recognize the differences...
I learned english at school and I never was great, but some years after that I *really* learned english by watching youtube vids, movies, shows and especially presidential debates etc.
I think English is one of the easiest languages to learn, especially when your native language is a germanic language. There is not much grammer to learn, for example in English there is almost no conjugation or declination. My English is not perfect, not even very good, but I can express whatever I want to say without any problems, and in my opinion that is exactly what you want to achieve when learning a foreign language: to be understood. The only thing I think can be a little challenging about English is the pronounciation, because one letter combination can have different pronounciations and vice versa.
As a German-American dual citizen living in Germany, I made the experience that learning how to spell and pronounce certain English words is a pain in the neck. I have been struggling with the formal English vocabulary that I need to learn to advance from level C1 to C2. Most of them were borrowed from Latin, Greek or French. I had French in school for two years and it doesn’t really help because I never got past level A2. I think German spelling is often easier than English spelling. German grammar is a whole different story. I still get cases wrong even after speaking and writing German for more than 29 years. Perhaps it's due to the fact that most of the time I speak a German dialect but have to write everything in Hochdeutsch (standard German). By the way, I can't write or read the German dialect that I speak.
Yeah, German grammar is pretty tricky, but the spelling is wonderfully easy! For the most part, words are just spelled as they sound. Not the case in English, it's so confusing!
I know a German woman, who is just under 40 years old. Born, raised, and still lives a little south of Heidelberg. She was required to take a German language test for some entry in a university course. She made a couple of errors on the test. I know one of them was where she used das instead of dass on something, not sure what the other one was. Anyway, if a German has trouble with German, I figure it has to be pretty tough for an English speaker.
+Patricia That's something I admit I have a hard time fully grasping - speaking in one language and writing in another. What you say in American English and what you write in American English are pretty much the same thing. Of course, you can write more formally or less formally but it's pretty much the same. I can't imagine speaking a language that I have never written or can't write.
+Kentix You can compare it to an American writing standard American English but actually speaking in a very strong southern dialect. Dialects don't have standardized grammar or spelling so everybody would write the same word differently. Due to that most people that speak dialects use their standard language when writing texts to make things easier to understand. Over here in Germany some dialects are so difficult to understand that we actually really need High German to be able to have a conversation. Another thing is that different dialects use different words for the same object.
Yes, I can understand it intellectually but what I meant was more on a psychological level. I just can't relate to it very much at all. I don't "feel" it in my gut because it's just so alien to my experience. I live in the American South and I've talked to some people with some really strong accents. My friend and I went far out in the countryside one day to go see something and we were talking with two little girls. At first I thought they were play-acting and making funny voices on purpose. It took me a minute to realize, no, they just talk that much different than us. It was very strange, but still we could talk. It was still American English and we had no real problem communicating. I may be wrong but it's my feeling that 95% of Americans can go to 95% of the rest of the country and talk with those 95% of the people there and have no problem communicating, even if things sound a little funny. We don't have huge areas where English is not mutually intelligible. It's like Dana's most recent video where she was talking about going home. When you're home you just know how things work instinctively. You don't have to think about it, you just feel it. This whole dialect/High German thing is like that. Nothing I've experienced in my life allows me to relate to it on a fundamental level. Even if my brain does understand it.
I've had classes in English, French, Greek, Latin, Dutch and Arabic and as a German (I only really speak German and English, though). Of those, English and Dutch were definitely the easiest to learn. But they are also the closest to German. Dutch literally has the same word order except for one or two rare exceptions and you can pretty much read Dutch if you speak English and German which I did when I started learning it. And English just doesn't have a lot of grammar you need to learn and you are constantly confronted with it in everyday life in Germany.
English is easy to learn. At least for me. It's especially easy if you are interested in sports like basketball (NBA) or american football, then you will speak (or atleast write), hear and generally just think in english every day. Also I started to talk with a canadian in school, that really helped me a lot, my english improved without me ever noticing it. A language that is also easy for germans or german speaking people to learn is dutch. I currently having dutch lessons in university and it is fairly easy for me at least. :D
i had an english teacher from the uk during my apprenticeship. he was the best teacher ever! my english was soooo bad and he helped me so much to improve it. btw he looked like james bond :D classy and funny guy. my nickname was goldfish because i was very dumb most of the time xD miss you mr. hadley
English was easy to learn. I wouldn´t say that my english is perfect but I try my best. Sadly when I was in primary school (4th grade) they told us that the kids in the 3rd Grade get English Lessons but we in the 4th Grade not. Our Teacher copied us the books but we got no english lessons. As a kid why i would learn more? From the 5th Grade to the 10th i had english lessons but it was not my friend. I have generally problems with grammar. When i don´t understand the german grammar, why i would understand the english grammar. I speak and write how it feels right and most times it´s right. After school i learned more english from Video Games. In the last 2 years I watched more often english UA-cam Videos. I understand 99% from the videos without subtitles or looking into a dictionary. When i write i look sometimes into a dictionary.
Still, you're lucky. In America we don't get offered foreign languages until at least middle school (starting age 12 or 13), and it isn't mandatory until highschool (starting age 14 or 15).
English might be easier to learn becouse it is ubiquitous (I love that word): tv-series on Netflix, materials on UA-cam, websites... This way you can practice your skills a lot more, which is probably the core of learning a new language.
Thanks for this video and the others. I have taught over ten years in Germany. At this point I am burned out and do not enjoy it as much as I did in the past. I encouage people that want to learn English to seek out teachers directly and avoid the language schools if possible. Your teacher will not only get paid more, but will be more motivated.
My son is interested in traveling to Germany. Hopefully, we will take a trip sometime next year. As a teacher, I often wonder about planning lessons for English Language Learners. In the US we think learning is supposed to be fun and we like to have our students interact. I'm wondering why it seems that students in other countries are uncomfortable. I don't want to stereotype anyone so I'll leave it at that. Thanks!
As a native English speaker, I never even thought about how difficult English was until I had to explain grammar rules, sentence structure, and prononciation of words to those who aren't native speakers. I feel like I take for granted how lucky I am to speak English as a first language and not something like a 2nd or 3rd
But English grammar is really easy when compared with European languages, both because of the similarities and the differences. It's the English spellings, pronunciations and word borrowings that make it weird, not really the grammar. Have you studied any other languages??
Yes, I have actually. I am fluent in French, have been studying Spanish for a few years now, and have dabbled in German and Polish (I haven't gotten very far with them honestly). I have seen that sentence structure is sightly different, but certainly not too complicated. For example, in English we tend to place certain adjectives in front of a noun: The black cat. However, in many European language, it is placed after: Le chat noir or el gato negro. It may be a small example, but it does take sometime to get used to. However, I do see where you are coming from and I can certainly agree
Nominative gender in languages like French, Spanish, Italian, and particularly German make those languages very hard for native English speakers. English has no such notion of a table being masculine or feminine. It's simply "the table", "the book", "the house". What makes nominative gender so frustrating for me trying to learn German is that it doesn't add any additional information in the effort to communicate an idea. I can say der Tisch or die Tisch in a sentence. One is correct grammatically but neither conveys any additional information. So we go to a lot of effort memorizing the meaningless genders of inanimate nouns simply for the sake of "color". The real issues with English are all the silent letters in words and all of the variances in ways to pronounce certain constructs in words. Thought, though, through, bough ... different sounds for all of the "ough" combinations. That sort of thing must be maddening for non English speakers trying to learn our language.
When you are in school in the USA, you will encounter at least one teacher who has put up a poster with the word "ghoti" and a picture of a gilled aquatic animal. It is a joke. It is to be pronounced "fish". The "gh" is from words like "rough". The "o" is from "women", the "ti" is from words like "nation". The joke is not consistent with how it would actually be pronounced according to the rules. It would be pronounced "goaty", just as it appears.
I would say Spanish is way more difficult than English, definitely. It has many more varieties (counting only the countries where it is the "de facto" official language), therefore there are many more different accents. It has way more complicated tenses which must be conjugated accordingly to each person so we can omit using personal pronouns all the time, etc. Plus, at least in Mexico (imagine the rest of the Spanish-speaking countries!), we have a huge and really confusing slang, in which one sole word can have so many different meanings, both positive and negative, depending on the situation. But for me, German is more difficult than Spanish, because of it's grammatical case system, like latin.
Wildpferd So I can't really objectively say whether English is easier or harder than Spanish because, of course, for me English is easier! But I definitely agree that German is harder than Spanish. I grew up learning Spanish and it had it's tricky parts for sure, but I never really struggled to understand the grammar...it was mostly just memorization. Whereas, like you said, German grammar is quite hard! BUT I will say that it's easier for me to understand someone speaking German than Spanish because as a general rule, German isn't spoken as quickly as Spanish :) I studied Spanish for 12 years and even studied in Spain and I still couldn't understand what they were saying on Spanish-language TV because the words came out so fast!! hahaha :D Whereas I feel German is pretty much the same as (or close to) the speed of English.
Wanted Adventure Yeah, maybe Spanish grammar is quite similar to English, talking about difficulty. I mean, I'm a native Spanish speaker and I see many similarities, like the flexibility in the order of the words in a sentence, whereas German is less flexible because of the different declensions you might need (or correct me if I'm wrong). As for the speed, I've kind of noticed that, and in addition to the fact that German is more phonetic than English, it's easier to understand when it is well spoken.
I can imaging that you are a awesome english teacher and I would sign up for a course of yours immediatly. Unfortunatly Munich is to far from my hometown. Anyway I love learning english. Its easy to learn but hart to master. That makes it so interesting. Keep up your good work with the videos. :)
Hey. I lived in Munich for a year, but I had to move. It is very sad that I'll never met you. I really wanted to improve my English, but there wasn't many super teachers like you. Anyway, I very like your videos and I am waiting for new. Keep going ;) Ps. Sorry for my English is still not so great like I wish.
I like your videos very much. I try to improve my English via viewing videos and movies in Englisch. I also got some contacts abroad. But my question would be, if you could try to do a Video (with subs) totally in German. I mean, that would be a kind of me doing videos in English. :D Its just interesting to hear it. :) Good luck and a lot of fun with your channel Enno :)
Hi Dana, I'm an American/Brazilian citizen. I have a bachelor's degree in linguistics from a US university. I would love to teach English in Germany or Austria, but some countries require a native English speaker. I live in the US since I was 17 years old and my accent is near-native. Do you think I have any chances of finding a teaching job in Germany or Austria? Thank you for all the great information. :)
+MsBrazillionaire Hey there! In my time living and teaching over here I have noticed that there is often a preference toward native English speakers, but it's definitely not a MUST have. I'm talking, of course, about teaching English at private language schools, not at state public schools, which would require other specialized teaching qualifications. At private language schools (such as Inlingua and PET Sprachen where I taught) it's up to them to decide if you are qualified to teach for them. You have some really strong qualifications -- a linguistics degree from a US university, after all! I've known several non-native speakers who have taught English and I've also known people from the US who have moved to Germany and taught German! So it's definitely possible for non-native speakers to teach over here :) For more details on the particulars of teaching in Germany, check out my more detailed video here ua-cam.com/video/6cZrttvtkSE/v-deo.html and let me know if you have any other questions, which I'll try my best to answer if I can! :) Good luck and best wishes to you!!
My english teacher from 6th to 9th class came from Texas. She were Ms. oder Mrs. (don't know the difference) Rathgeber-Zack. I think, that this is the best thing, that could happen for learning english. I really like the american speaking way much more, than the british. So because of that I could get much deeper into the language, than most others. It was really cool. My english isn't perfect, but the reason mostly is, that I'm not language talented.
Interesting to hear! I've had some people say they think Americans are easier to hear, and others find British English easier to understand. I guess everyone is different in that way :) "Mrs." is for a women who is married and "Ms." can be used for women who are married or not married.
Thanks for your answer ;) So I guess I can decide this way?: With 'r' if the woman has a Mr and without, if she has no Mr? So if the r would represent the r of Mr? Ok, that would be easy to remember.
There are three ways to refer to a woman/girl: Mrs. , pronounced Missus (the 'u' is a schwa) You definitely know she is married. A widow might or might not like being referred to as Mrs. Miss, is only used to refer to young women or girls. The older the woman (say, 21+), the more likely she is to feel insulted by not being treated as a grown woman. To refer to a much older woman (40+) as a Miss would be pandering to her vanity. Agatha Christie's character Miss Marple was from a much different time. Ms. , pronounced as Mizz. This is always your safest bet. It works with married women and unmarried women, regardless of whether you are aware of their marriage status. It works with older women (Hillary Clinton is often referred to as Ms. Clinton, for example). It works for young girls. Modern married women often prefer it because it treats them as individuals separate from their partners.
If you travel in the American South prepare to hear miss more often. It's not uncommon to have it used before a first name and not a last name as a term of respect. For example, in many fast food restaurants in the country the workers wear name tags with their first name on them. Mary or Tiffany or Abby or whatever. There are restaurants here like that if you go in there the nametags will say Miss Tiffany or Miss Abby. It is used other places like that, as well.
Mrs is a title used for a married woman or a widow. Mrs Stefan Germanman means she is married and her husband's name is Stefan. Mrs Dana Germanman means she was married and her husband is now dead. Mrs is typically used in social settings. Ms is a title used for a woman. It is not used with the woman's husband's name. Thus, Ms Stefan Germanman is wrong. Ms Dana Germanman is right. Ms is typically used in business settings. Miss is a title for a woman who has never been married. It has fallen out of general use. It is typically used only for prepubescent girls. Exception: Across the South, it is common for elementary school students to call their female teachers Miss (First name); for example, Miss Kimberley, Miss Agnes, Miss Julie. This applies regardless of age or marital status. As with everything else in English, there are many exceptions to these rules.
My mother tongue is Spanish and I find English to be easy to learn because the verbs are easy to conjugate. Basically they dont'n change. And most nouns have no gender and there is a single article for all ('the') whereas in Spanish, as well as German and all the roman languages, you have to learn the gender of every noun and the corresponding article. When I started to learn English I used to find British much easier to understand but later on I could pick up American English just as well.
What did you major in? I'd love to live in Germany after college but I don't know what kind of job I could get if I got a communications degree. Love your videos :)
I learned English, Latin and the basics of Italian and Danish. English was definitely the easiest, I was confronted with so much English online, in games, in songs and so on that it just came naturally. Latin started out fine but became very hard after a year of learning. Italian and Danish are not as easy as English but not that hard either. The strange thing is that every language got harder the longer I learned it, except English - that one just didn't require actual work anymore after the first year.
It is interesting in my case, that i can nearly perfectly understand english and read in english, but I have enormous problems with writing and speaking. (Btw. Im from germany)
English is one of the easiest languages to learn in my opinion. I have much more difficulties with french than with english, i don't know it just doesn't seem to work with me.
Hello! I am so happy to find your channel! Thanks to Easy German. I want to study in Germany. I have just started learning German. It is so different than any other language I've dealt before. Now you will be my inspiration)) Thank you
Hey! Thanks so much purplena14 :D If you have any specific questions about studying German/moving to Germany let me know and maybe I could answer it in a video for you!
Hey! I think a good idea is to film a video about your tips and sort of recommendations on studying German. May be you have your own approach, some useful links and books, ways to deal with grammar, etc. Hope you have a nice day :)
You read my mind :D I JUST finished writing a script about how I learned German. Really glad to get the positive feedback that someone would be interested in hearing about it! I'll go back and re-read it, and perhaps add some useful links and books like you mentioned. Thanks! :) You have a nice day too.
actually i had more trouble learning german (being german) than learning english :D the german grammar drove me nuuuuuuuts, whereas english was always a necessary tool to understand what happend in the internet when i was 14 (2008). i also think i basically learned english in youtube listening to vlogs of us-teenagers' daily-life. thats what i love the internet for and this is exactly how i learn spanish right now
Dana maybe you couldclear up something which has bothered me for some time.The first is the seemingly confusion of Shhhhhhh... and Pssssssssst i have always been taught to use Shhh when you want to politely ask someone to be quiet and Pssst when you want to get someones attention nnear you or perhapswant towhisper something in their ear. I haveoften seen on signs inside a bldg the word psst tosay that all should be quiet. Have you alsso noticed this?
It is easy, because the grammar is not so hard and also it is spoken all over the globe, so I have a lot more motivation to learn it, than to learn a language that is only spoken in a little area. I need English to comment this video for example.
As a native English speaker, learning French my answer to the question has to be, Yes! Because of all the Influence other languages have had on English.
Good question...in Munich it's usually best to have a bachelor's degree (pretty much in anything! lol), and then some form of teacher training, so for example the TEFL/TESOL certification or other. In the next few weeks I'll be publishing a more in-depth video with that kind of information, but I hope this helps for now :)
English is easy. It uses european letterS, there is almost no letter you do not pronounce and no declination. And the order of phrases are pretty logical : Subject/verb/complement. In comparison I know french, german and I study chinese and japanene : English is definitely the easiest one !
I learned English, German, French, Latin and ancient Greek in school (I'm Dutch). I don't think English is hard to learn, not only because the grammar is very easy, there's English everywhere around us, so it's not hard to practice. For me, German wasn't that hard either, because a lot of German words are very similar in Dutch. However, the grammar is quite a different story (Dutch doesn't have cases) and because the languages are so much alike, it's easier to make mistakes. Sometimes I think I know what a German word means, but it can turn out to have a totally different meaning (for example 'bellen' in German means 'barking' but in Dutch it's calling someone on the phone). I didn't think French grammar was that difficult, but the vocabulary and pronunciation were harder to learn. Ancient Greek was hard because of the alphabet, the weird grammatical structures and tenses and there were just so many exceptions. However, I would say Latin is BY FAR the hardest language I learned. The grammar is extremely complicated, but very logical once you get it (just like maths). Luckily we only had to translate from Latin to Dutch and I was actually pretty good at it :D
My German dad came to Canada in the 60s and learned English with no formal training by watching TV, reading comic books that had lots of pictures and little dialogue, working with English speakers and above all marrying my English speaking mother! But here's a funny story from when he first came and was relying on a dictionary to help him communicate. As you know, Germans pronounce 'ie' as long e, and 'ei' as long i. English is made up of many other languages including German, French, Nordic and Latin. Therefore, 'ie' in English can be pronounced many ways depending on what word it is in. Receive is pronounced as long e, but weigh is pronounced like long a, and pie is pronounced as long i. See how confusing it could be to a non-native English speaker? And those are just a few examples! So, my dad wet into a restaurant to order pie, and said it this way: "I would like a piece (long e) of pie (long e). But he pronounce pie as pee and everyone laughed as the waitress teased him and kept asking over and over what he wanted. That day, he learned a valuable lesson in the variances of ie and ei.
bei dem deutsch in den anderen "wanted adventure"videos hätte ich total t(r)olle Wörter benutzt wie jöölboom und sehr viel wie und wer (false friends) etc.
Does anyone here know about the other way around? I mean if I went to America as a native German could I just go to a school and ask them if they needed a German teacher or how would that work?
+MellyMorphia Normally you would need 3-5 years of university and in some cases would need to be certified, especially if you were going to teach special needs students...a tutor however is more lenient, and also more like Dana described her experiences, teacher is the wrong word here.
I think that learning English is slightly easier than learning the average language, because its grammar is simpler than those of the inflected languages, and those using several different cases, such as German and Latin. But, it is more difficult than Spanish or Dutch, because it uses many spellings that do not match the spoken words, and it has thousands of exceptions to grammar and spelling rules. Spanish has almost no exceptions. Everything follows the rules. Once you know the rules, everything is easy. Dutch is also always spelt exactly as it sounds. Danish has an even more simple grammar than English, but it has 23 different vowel sounds, many of which are almost impossible for a foreigner to reproduce. it also has a VERY small vocabulary, as compared to English or German, and so, a foreign learner must learn all the differences in word order and voice tone, to understand how the nuances of how to communicate on a higher level. I speak Dutch and English, and have been living 2-5 months per year in Deutschland over the past 35 years (5 years in Bremen 30 in Muenchen) , and yet, I still am not completely comfortable in speaking German. I can get along and make myself understood, but cannot hold long, complicated conversations, and there are still things I don't understand. I am much better in Plattduutsch, as the word order, idiomatic phrases and word spellings and meanings are so much closer to Dutch than those of Hochdeutsch. My Spanish is better than my German, and, yet, I have spent much less time in Spain, using it much more in Los Angeles.
What is the curicullum these days for English? Do you have to teach BE or are you allowed to teach AE ? English is - I think ist is a fact- one of the easiest languages. It Hand Neapels no capitalization, verbs and adverbs are not conjugated to the object only to tempus and mode. Most verbs arme regular. There is only one article, etc. etc.
Oh yes, English is not easy to learn. I will try very hard to improve my skills. I like your channel very much because you're an English teacher, you made many great videos on youtube, so I can learn from them. The best part of it is, your teaching is for free ( here on youtube ). Oh yeah, " for free" that's my favorite price. ;-)
Is English a hard language to learn? After learning 3 other languages, I'm very glad that English is my mother tongue. I can't imagine trying to learn it as a foreign language because so much of it just doesn't make any sense.
no, it's easy. It basically doesn't have any grammar...well it does, but...verbs for example....there's no conjugation. I learnt Spanish, French and English in school...my English teacher wasn't the best. Sometimes I wonder how I even speak English now. But out of those 3 languages I took in school, English is now the one I'm best at. I understand pretty much everything and I'm pretty fluent
Hello Dana, as an English teacher you're very talented and I am sure you do a great job. Have you thought about teaching English many thousends of students online ? I mean as an English podcaster. It is fun, studends would love it and you could make a lot of money. MfG Jan
English is most certainly the easiest language I've learned. The most difficult was french, ´cause despite of the Portuguese (my native language) Latin origin the structure is waaaaaay different. I guess, also, that English is easier because we have more contact with it through music, videos, shows,etc.
English speakers are generally good at making sense out of what people speaking very poor English are saying because we hear so many different accents, In fact, if we don't understand somebody speaking very bad English we apologize. So I tell people struggling to speak English--Give it your best shot and we will sort it out
I'm a native English speaker and I learn German. I've learnt that English is probably the only language where people can learn it, speak it in some what of a wrong way but we still understand them and they can get on with their lives in England. However, if you mix words up in German, the sentence means something completely different and that means that you couldn't really get on with it because you'd sound idiotic all of the time! English, I'd say, is easy to learn to speak but learning to write is harder.
Learning spoken English is easy, and I've seen immigrants become functional English speakers in less than two years. Learning written English is rather difficult. Many native speakers still haven't mastered it by adulthood. Personally, in addition to math and science and art and other subjects at school, I had seven years of spelling (in addition to grammar and composition). And I don't think anyone can learn the entire vocabulary in his or her lifetime. It's rare for me, but I still occasionally come across a word I've never seen before, and I'm now in my forties.
well i'm German and i think in general English is a lot easier to learn than German because of the grammar and the conjugation for example :) but especially between these 2 languages is a huge gap according pronunciation and intonation so that's, i guess, why it's hard for both sides to learn the other language
I also think that overall English grammar seems pretty uncomplicated compared to some other languages, but I'm a native speaker, so I figured I'm also a little but biased lol Spelling is the one thing that I know is trickier in English though! You never can be sure how a word is spelled English...
+Wanted Adventure Did you try to become a "real" teacher for regular German schools? I had my first native speaker as teacher when I attended an university.
Wether English is a difficult language to learn is not that easy to answer. I wouldn't say it's hard, however we also have to learn English from the age of 10, so it might be a hard, I just haven't noticed it because I've started so young. And the younger you are the easier it is to learn a new language. I'm Dutch, I like to say that I'm pretty fluent in English, I'm good at understanding German, but I have some problems speaking or writing it. And I know a little French. When Someone talks to me in German or in French, I translate it in my head. However I don't do that with English, I just understand it. So it seems like English is easier, but maybe I'm just used to it.
Hello, i know your channel because i see easy language channel, i study german, i like so much, but i have more facility with english, my native language is portuguese, i will follow you now, tchuss
Just one tip for your students. Stop thinking, start talking. Building a thought and a sentence in German first, just to dumb it down till it fits English isn't fun. Insert some Mark Twain quotes about these two languages here and you see my point.
English is a pretty easy language to learn, if there is any easy language. Especially Germans should be happy as English and German are quite related. Of course this was not what I saw when I had to learn English at school ;-P I was really bad! But now that I have learned more languages with a more difficult grammar, I think I should feel happy that English is the worlds language and not Korean or Hungarian which are waaaaay more difficult. I adore asian people being fluent in English as it is so far away from their native tongue.
as a finnish/swedish speaker all indoeuropean langwitshes are easy to speak but theres no logic to the selling, in finnish every letter is pronaunst so you just write what u say...
+Henrik Eskola Yes, you are right about English spelling not being logical, but English grammar is the easiest grammar of the European languages. Do you know what a 'Spelling Bee' competition is ?.....'Spelling Bee's' only make sense in an English speaking country !.
oh yeah, I have heard that Latin is HARD!! I only know how to count to 10 in Latin, and that's not too tricky lol but I've heard it's a really complicated language.
Wanted Adventure okay now that's funny, I don't know how to count in latin even though I learned it in school for 5 years and got the "Latinum" xD If you ever think about learning latin (which I doubt you will ^^), really don't xD I used to love it the first year but then I stopped learning for once and now I just hate it... I'm lucky I passed the school year with an "4" and because of that got the Latinum, because to be honest I barely know anything anymore about it, now a year later :D The grammar is so freaking hard and you can't even train it by talking to other people in it because this language is... well pretty much dead..
English grammar is easy, close to nonexistent. A rudimentary case system for pronouns, that German based learners soon know better than the natives... But spelling is soooo irregular. Not that hard, just has to be learned with every word. Vocab: soo varied in English. You have Anglic, Saxon, Norse, Latin, Old French, even some Celtic languages, to draw from. So there are often completely different words for the same thing used in slightly differing nuances. Not all that difficult, just very rich. And what's really hard are idiomatic expressions. English is a very idiomatic language. German has its share of idioms as well, but one has to accept that they don't translate. So there is this whole slew of constructs that consist of more than just one word, and you just have to learn them just like vocabulary.
Everyone in the comments is saying how bad the are at English and they write these huge paragraphs and yet their English is great (spelling and grammar wise)
When I was in public school, I had some English teachers who couldn't speak English.
They actually knew less than me.... and they always spoke saxon-english, that sounded like "äh .. hello .. äh ... I äm se best englisch lehrer of se earth"
+SwatTeamExit Sounds like my last englisch teacher. Sometimes if anyone gives him an answear He said:" ok what does ... mean? Because ....The other students don't know." (but everyone knew the meaning, whithout him)
+Flame DeNuit nur er nicht = without him? nice:D
Peter! "Whithout him" kann man grob übersetzen mit "abgesehen von ihm" und das bedeutet ja so ziemlich das gleiche wie "nur er nicht"
Flame DeNuit ja ne kann man eben nich so übersetzen.. sag except him oder and only he didn't oder so. aber without him is einfach falsch.
Peter! Okay, dann ist es eben falsch. Reg dich ab, ist doch nicht so schlimm, oder?! Jeder macht doch mal einen Fehler
Hey Dana, I am a fellow adventurer like you and I found the video very insightful. I will be travelling to Germany in a few months, and I am highly interested in teaching English there when I go.
Thanks for these videos, they're very helpful. I look forward to the follow-up video.
Cheers!
I am german (from Munich) and I have no idea, why i am watching this :D
Same xD
+Kraxe6sic6 hahaha ich bin auch aus münchen XD
+Kraxe6sic6 weil es amüsant ist? xD deswegen schaue ich sie
Desperadox23 bavaria is in germany XD
+Kraxe6sic6 it's funny getting another view on stuff
You do sound like an English teacher..I don't know why. It's just the way you speak^^
English was pretty easy to learn. Then again my parents made sure I learned both English & Spanish when I started talking so I guess I never really had a hard time with the language. Only time I hard problems was writing in Spanish since it has accents but it gets easy as long as you know the rules.
Alexandra Garcia My husband and I plan the same thing with our children. Teaching them both Dutch (our mother tongue) and English from the start. Especially since English is spoken in so many countries these days! Do you find it helpful to speak both?
Ainiewainy Yes. It helps a lot knowing both.
for me it is easy because everybody listens to english music and knows a few words only by hearing them
As a German I would say that English ist probably the easiest language to learn of all , because they're so similar and the grammar is not so complicated.
at school i learn englisch and french and i must admit that i have BIG problems with grammar in every language... so as french has a very complicated grammar, i just hate learning it, especially in comparison to english. i love english sooo much, it just sounds great, has easy grammar and is pretty useful too. i would also say that learning english as a german seems loads easier than learning german as an nglish speaking person
Lin Lee el oh and how your english now?
why english is hard: the exemptions-there is a rule, and there are a whole bunch of exemptions which you have to memorize. writing vs pronunciation- depending on where the word comes from (celtic, latin, germanic, norse or french) it is different how you write down the same sound(as opposed to german or hungarian, where you have letters or specific digraphs assigned to each sound, and you simply write down what you hear)
why it is easy: it is everywhere, you can just absorb it. The language is still in an early stage of development, and so grammar is not complicated as opposed to -again- german or hungarian or russian.
You've got it exactly the opposite of what's really going on. It's not in an early stage of development it's in a late stage of development. It's as old as German (which it has to be since they both came from the same root). English used to have all those grammatical features that other languages have but they were later dropped and the language was simplified. We decided we no longer needed those things.
Similarly, Spanish and other Romance languages have simplified Latin grammar.
It's Romanic languages, not Romance languages. These languages have nothing to do with romantic novels, even though a lot of well known writers of that genre come from Spain :D
+Benedikt Bauer in english it's called "romance languages" the literature is called romantic.
Hmm, ok my dictionary says the english equivalent for German word Romanisch is romanic. While romance is the equivalent to german Romanze -> a love experience
Yes, the word romance has dual uses and does mean that second definition also. There is a category in literature called romance novels, which definitely has that meaning. But, for whatever reason, it is also used to describe the family of languages descended from Latin.
Hey Dana, as a native german speaker I never really thought about the german language. When I started learning French a few years ago I realised that I didn't think about the English language as well. I started learning English at age 8 or 9 I guess. And now I'm 19. So I think it really depends at what age you start learning a foreign language. If I started learning French 10 years ago, I surely would be as "fluent" as I'm now in English.
i learn english at school and think it's not that hard to learn, i think it's way easier than learning german and i like learning english way more than learning spanish and latin
pepita siemandel oh and how your english now?
Easy to start with since it has strong tendencies of an isolating language, like Chinesese, and thus lacks a huge amount of the inflexions but when it goes into the depts of it, it can become quite hard for the syntax is quite strict.
+bluerisk I agree. I do not think you can make the general assumption that language X is easier/not as easy to learn as language Y. It is a fact that English is a highly analytic language, i.e. meaning is determined by word order rather that inflection, as is the case with laguages such as Latin, a highly synthetic language where inflections define meaning ang the word order is almost arbitrary (there is, however, a usual word order in prose: SOV). Ever since the Old English times, the variety of inflections has been decreasing.
Germans can probably learn English easier than other languages because English and German are both Germanic languages and thus related.
I think english is rather easy to learn. Not to learn that good that you're perfect or sound as if you were a native speaker, but to learn it to a certain point from which on people will understand you, no matter how many mistakes you make. But I can only compare it to latin and spanish, so maybe I just picked very hard languages to learn, I don't know.
The only thing, I will never be able to understand are the rules when it comes to using 'if'. There was a time when I avoided it, using whether whenever I could. But now I just try to listen to my stomach (do english speaking people also have something like a stomach feeling, telling you what to do?) and hope, I'm right. I actually listen to my stomach in both english and german, as I was never able to remember grammar rules but without being able to explain it, I was usually right with my 'creations'. Maybe that's what I like about english so much, my stomach speaks english as well. It never knew any good advice in spanish or latin. :D
Birgit Schwäbe I definitely listen to my stomach while speaking German! And when speaking English it's just what comes naturally. Although, when I started teaching English, I realized a couple things I'd been saying were technically wrong, so I tried to correct them... at least for the sake of my students!
Speaking of "when" versus "if," I learned this was tricky for German speakers when I first started dating Mr. German Man. We were out one night and he said something to me like "If we get home, we should order a pizza," or something like that, and I got very alarmed! I was like, IF?!! Why is us getting home an IF? "If" means that it might not happen! Like if you're caught in a horrible storm and you think you might die you'd say, "IF we get home..." but not on a normal night :D So in this case, it should have been "When we get home, we should order a pizza."
Well, I would have been very alarmed in that moment as well :D. But the meaning of if is not the main problem of us germans, I think, but which 'time' you use for the verbs in the half sentence with and the other one without the if. That is really really confusing.
Birgit Schwäbe Aaah yes. I understand. Yeah, I can see how that could be confusing. There are definitely some German grammatical constructions I struggle with in the same way! I feel your pain :)
I'm just curious, Dana, why you responded that you also listen to your stomach, instead of telling him we say, "listen to my gut."
Thx for your videos. It's always fun watching them. Especially as I live in Munich too. I do not speak so many languages, so I can hardly answer your question. The only other language I really learned is Latin (English from the 5th grade till the Abitur (Leistungskurs Englisch), and Latin from the 7th grade till the 11th). Then a view words in Thai, and some more in Elvish (but that does not count.
I think English is relatively easy to learn as it is in many ways similar to German (like the same language group or whatever you call it). I can read an unknown English text with many words I don't know and still comprehend what is about and really understanding it and not having to look up the words.
And then I can have an Latin text and having no clue what it says at all. You easily understand I was not very good in that language... at least in the end. You read the text and you have to figure out what are the verbs, what are the nouns... and what conjugation and declaration the words have... Not sure if I come across...
But it is nice to listen to the observations of a foreigner who lives in Germany. It shows me things I never realized about Germany as it was "normal" to me as I grew up with it... And I did not live long enough in other countries to really recognize the differences...
I learned english at school and I never was great, but some years after that I *really* learned english by watching youtube vids, movies, shows and especially presidential debates etc.
Oh you look like Anne Hattaway ! that's amazing !
In addition to everything interesting about your videos which I REALLY LOVE , I just wanted to comment on your Blouse , it's really beautiful :)
Back to the old intro music? I love it! :D
I think English is one of the easiest languages to learn, especially when your native language is a germanic language. There is not much grammer to learn, for example in English there is almost no conjugation or declination. My English is not perfect, not even very good, but I can express whatever I want to say without any problems, and in my opinion that is exactly what you want to achieve when learning a foreign language: to be understood. The only thing I think can be a little challenging about English is the pronounciation, because one letter combination can have different pronounciations and vice versa.
As a German-American dual citizen living in Germany, I made the experience that learning how to spell and pronounce certain English words is a pain in the neck. I have been struggling with the formal English vocabulary that I need to learn to advance from level C1 to C2. Most of them were borrowed from Latin, Greek or French. I had French in school for two years and it doesn’t really help because I never got past level A2. I think German spelling is often easier than English spelling. German grammar is a whole different story. I still get cases wrong even after speaking and writing German for more than 29 years. Perhaps it's due to the fact that most of the time I speak a German dialect but have to write everything in Hochdeutsch (standard German). By the way, I can't write or read the German dialect that I speak.
Yeah, German grammar is pretty tricky, but the spelling is wonderfully easy! For the most part, words are just spelled as they sound. Not the case in English, it's so confusing!
I know a German woman, who is just under 40 years old. Born, raised, and still lives a little south of Heidelberg. She was required to take a German language test for some entry in a university course. She made a couple of errors on the test. I know one of them was where she used das instead of dass on something, not sure what the other one was. Anyway, if a German has trouble with German, I figure it has to be pretty tough for an English speaker.
+Patricia That's something I admit I have a hard time fully grasping - speaking in one language and writing in another. What you say in American English and what you write in American English are pretty much the same thing. Of course, you can write more formally or less formally but it's pretty much the same. I can't imagine speaking a language that I have never written or can't write.
+Kentix You can compare it to an American writing standard American English but actually speaking in a very strong southern dialect. Dialects don't have standardized grammar or spelling so everybody would write the same word differently. Due to that most people that speak dialects use their standard language when writing texts to make things easier to understand. Over here in Germany some dialects are so difficult to understand that we actually really need High German to be able to have a conversation. Another thing is that different dialects use different words for the same object.
Yes, I can understand it intellectually but what I meant was more on a psychological level. I just can't relate to it very much at all. I don't "feel" it in my gut because it's just so alien to my experience.
I live in the American South and I've talked to some people with some really strong accents. My friend and I went far out in the countryside one day to go see something and we were talking with two little girls. At first I thought they were play-acting and making funny voices on purpose. It took me a minute to realize, no, they just talk that much different than us. It was very strange, but still we could talk. It was still American English and we had no real problem communicating. I may be wrong but it's my feeling that 95% of Americans can go to 95% of the rest of the country and talk with those 95% of the people there and have no problem communicating, even if things sound a little funny. We don't have huge areas where English is not mutually intelligible.
It's like Dana's most recent video where she was talking about going home. When you're home you just know how things work instinctively. You don't have to think about it, you just feel it. This whole dialect/High German thing is like that. Nothing I've experienced in my life allows me to relate to it on a fundamental level. Even if my brain does understand it.
Each time I watch a video of Yours I doubt if the clocks are correct. But I'm to lazy to find out in general.
Love Your clocks!
I've had classes in English, French, Greek, Latin, Dutch and Arabic and as a German (I only really speak German and English, though). Of those, English and Dutch were definitely the easiest to learn. But they are also the closest to German.
Dutch literally has the same word order except for one or two rare exceptions and you can pretty much read Dutch if you speak English and German which I did when I started learning it.
And English just doesn't have a lot of grammar you need to learn and you are constantly confronted with it in everyday life in Germany.
English is easy to learn. At least for me. It's especially easy if you are interested in sports like basketball (NBA) or american football, then you will speak (or atleast write), hear and generally just think in english every day. Also I started to talk with a canadian in school, that really helped me a lot, my english improved without me ever noticing it. A language that is also easy for germans or german speaking people to learn is dutch. I currently having dutch lessons in university and it is fairly easy for me at least. :D
i had an english teacher from the uk during my apprenticeship. he was the best teacher ever! my english was soooo bad and he helped me so much to improve it. btw he looked like james bond :D classy and funny guy. my nickname was goldfish because i was very dumb most of the time xD miss you mr. hadley
I used to have an English teacher form California, I think he had a similar deal with the school as you described.
English was easy to learn. I wouldn´t say that my english is perfect but I try my best. Sadly when I was in primary school (4th grade) they told us that the kids in the 3rd Grade get English Lessons but we in the 4th Grade not. Our Teacher copied us the books but we got no english lessons. As a kid why i would learn more? From the 5th Grade to the 10th i had english lessons but it was not my friend. I have generally problems with grammar. When i don´t understand the german grammar, why i would understand the english grammar. I speak and write how it feels right and most times it´s right.
After school i learned more english from Video Games. In the last 2 years I watched more often english UA-cam Videos. I understand 99% from the videos without subtitles or looking into a dictionary. When i write i look sometimes into a dictionary.
ZeldaFreak Well, for what it's worth, your English is perfect.
Touché
When i understood this correct than thanks.
ZeldaFreak You're welcome, sweetie!
ZeldaFreak damn that's good
Still, you're lucky. In America we don't get offered foreign languages until at least middle school (starting age 12 or 13), and it isn't mandatory until highschool (starting age 14 or 15).
English might be easier to learn becouse it is ubiquitous (I love that word): tv-series on Netflix, materials on UA-cam, websites... This way you can practice your skills a lot more, which is probably the core of learning a new language.
Thanks for this video and the others. I have taught over ten years in Germany. At this point I am burned out and do not enjoy it as much as I did in the past. I encouage people that want to learn English to seek out teachers directly and avoid the language schools if possible. Your teacher will not only get paid more, but will be more motivated.
My son is interested in traveling to Germany. Hopefully, we will take a trip sometime next year. As a teacher, I often wonder about planning lessons for English Language Learners. In the US we think learning is supposed to be fun and we like to have our students interact. I'm wondering why it seems that students in other countries are uncomfortable. I don't want to stereotype anyone so I'll leave it at that. Thanks!
As a native English speaker, I never even thought about how difficult English was until I had to explain grammar rules, sentence structure, and prononciation of words to those who aren't native speakers. I feel like I take for granted how lucky I am to speak English as a first language and not something like a 2nd or 3rd
But English grammar is really easy when compared with European languages, both because of the similarities and the differences. It's the English spellings, pronunciations and word borrowings that make it weird, not really the grammar. Have you studied any other languages??
Yes, I have actually. I am fluent in French, have been studying Spanish for a few years now, and have dabbled in German and Polish (I haven't gotten very far with them honestly). I have seen that sentence structure is sightly different, but certainly not too complicated. For example, in English we tend to place certain adjectives in front of a noun: The black cat. However, in many European language, it is placed after: Le chat noir or el gato negro. It may be a small example, but it does take sometime to get used to.
However, I do see where you are coming from and I can certainly agree
Nominative gender in languages like French, Spanish, Italian, and particularly German make those languages very hard for native English speakers. English has no such notion of a table being masculine or feminine. It's simply "the table", "the book", "the house". What makes nominative gender so frustrating for me trying to learn German is that it doesn't add any additional information in the effort to communicate an idea. I can say der Tisch or die Tisch in a sentence. One is correct grammatically but neither conveys any additional information. So we go to a lot of effort memorizing the meaningless genders of inanimate nouns simply for the sake of "color".
The real issues with English are all the silent letters in words and all of the variances in ways to pronounce certain constructs in words. Thought, though, through, bough ... different sounds for all of the "ough" combinations. That sort of thing must be maddening for non English speakers trying to learn our language.
When you are in school in the USA, you will encounter at least one teacher who has put up a poster with the word "ghoti" and a picture of a gilled aquatic animal. It is a joke. It is to be pronounced "fish". The "gh" is from words like "rough". The "o" is from "women", the "ti" is from words like "nation".
The joke is not consistent with how it would actually be pronounced according to the rules. It would be pronounced "goaty", just as it appears.
I would say Spanish is way more difficult than English, definitely. It has many more varieties (counting only the countries where it is the "de facto" official language), therefore there are many more different accents. It has way more complicated tenses which must be conjugated accordingly to each person so we can omit using personal pronouns all the time, etc. Plus, at least in Mexico (imagine the rest of the Spanish-speaking countries!), we have a huge and really confusing slang, in which one sole word can have so many different meanings, both positive and negative, depending on the situation. But for me, German is more difficult than Spanish, because of it's grammatical case system, like latin.
Wildpferd So I can't really objectively say whether English is easier or harder than Spanish because, of course, for me English is easier! But I definitely agree that German is harder than Spanish. I grew up learning Spanish and it had it's tricky parts for sure, but I never really struggled to understand the grammar...it was mostly just memorization. Whereas, like you said, German grammar is quite hard! BUT I will say that it's easier for me to understand someone speaking German than Spanish because as a general rule, German isn't spoken as quickly as Spanish :) I studied Spanish for 12 years and even studied in Spain and I still couldn't understand what they were saying on Spanish-language TV because the words came out so fast!! hahaha :D Whereas I feel German is pretty much the same as (or close to) the speed of English.
Wildpferd
I suppose so. Nevertheless Spanish and English is not hard to learn in general, compared to most other languages.
Wanted Adventure Yeah, maybe Spanish grammar is quite similar to English, talking about difficulty. I mean, I'm a native Spanish speaker and I see many similarities, like the flexibility in the order of the words in a sentence, whereas German is less flexible because of the different declensions you might need (or correct me if I'm wrong). As for the speed, I've kind of noticed that, and in addition to the fact that German is more phonetic than English, it's easier to understand when it is well spoken.
dXb Yeah I know. Slavic languages (i.e Polish, Hungarian and Russian), Finnish and Chinese are in another level!
+Wildpferd German is pretty flexible.
I can imaging that you are a awesome english teacher and I would sign up for a course of yours immediatly. Unfortunatly Munich is to far from my hometown. Anyway I love learning english. Its easy to learn but hart to master. That makes it so interesting. Keep up your good work with the videos. :)
Hey. I lived in Munich for a year, but I had to move. It is very sad that I'll never met you. I really wanted to improve my English, but there wasn't many super teachers like you. Anyway, I very like your videos and I am waiting for new. Keep going ;) Ps. Sorry for my English is still not so great like I wish.
I like your videos very much. I try to improve my English via viewing videos and movies in Englisch. I also got some contacts abroad. But my question would be, if you could try to do a Video (with subs) totally in German. I mean, that would be a kind of me doing videos in English. :D Its just interesting to hear it. :) Good luck and a lot of fun with your channel
Enno :)
Hi Dana, I'm an American/Brazilian citizen. I have a bachelor's degree in linguistics from a US university. I would love to teach English in Germany or Austria, but some countries require a native English speaker. I live in the US since I was 17 years old and my accent is near-native. Do you think I have any chances of finding a teaching job in Germany or Austria? Thank you for all the great information. :)
+MsBrazillionaire Hey there! In my time living and teaching over here I have noticed that there is often a preference toward native English speakers, but it's definitely not a MUST have.
I'm talking, of course, about teaching English at private language schools, not at state public schools, which would require other specialized teaching qualifications. At private language schools (such as Inlingua and PET Sprachen where I taught) it's up to them to decide if you are qualified to teach for them.
You have some really strong qualifications -- a linguistics degree from a US university, after all! I've known several non-native speakers who have taught English and I've also known people from the US who have moved to Germany and taught German! So it's definitely possible for non-native speakers to teach over here :)
For more details on the particulars of teaching in Germany, check out my more detailed video here ua-cam.com/video/6cZrttvtkSE/v-deo.html and let me know if you have any other questions, which I'll try my best to answer if I can! :) Good luck and best wishes to you!!
+Wanted Adventure Thank you so much!! :)
English seems sooo easy if you ever tried to learn finnish!
+König der Kalmare
Suomen kieli on törkeää !!!
Say I'm Estonian, would it make any difference?
personally as a native English speaker studying Chinese and Spanish really opened my eyes as to how hard the English language was.
language schools often charge in the region of 80 euro an hour and pay only 20 euro or less to the English teacher.
Do you know the Fremdspracheninstitut (FIM) on Amalienstrasse?
I think english is easy to learn, I learnt it when I was 7 years old. It helped that I watched a lot of english TV and of course UA-cam.
My english teacher from 6th to 9th class came from Texas. She were Ms. oder Mrs. (don't know the difference) Rathgeber-Zack.
I think, that this is the best thing, that could happen for learning english. I really like the american speaking way much more, than the british. So because of that I could get much deeper into the language, than most others. It was really cool.
My english isn't perfect, but the reason mostly is, that I'm not language talented.
Interesting to hear! I've had some people say they think Americans are easier to hear, and others find British English easier to understand. I guess everyone is different in that way :) "Mrs." is for a women who is married and "Ms." can be used for women who are married or not married.
Thanks for your answer ;)
So I guess I can decide this way?:
With 'r' if the woman has a Mr and without, if she has no Mr?
So if the r would represent the r of Mr? Ok, that would be easy to remember.
There are three ways to refer to a woman/girl:
Mrs. , pronounced Missus (the 'u' is a schwa) You definitely know she is married. A widow might or might not like being referred to as Mrs.
Miss, is only used to refer to young women or girls. The older the woman (say, 21+), the more likely she is to feel insulted by not being treated as a grown woman. To refer to a much older woman (40+) as a Miss would be pandering to her vanity. Agatha Christie's character Miss Marple was from a much different time.
Ms. , pronounced as Mizz. This is always your safest bet. It works with married women and unmarried women, regardless of whether you are aware of their marriage status. It works with older women (Hillary Clinton is often referred to as Ms. Clinton, for example). It works for young girls. Modern married women often prefer it because it treats them as individuals separate from their partners.
If you travel in the American South prepare to hear miss more often. It's not uncommon to have it used before a first name and not a last name as a term of respect. For example, in many fast food restaurants in the country the workers wear name tags with their first name on them. Mary or Tiffany or Abby or whatever. There are restaurants here like that if you go in there the nametags will say Miss Tiffany or Miss Abby. It is used other places like that, as well.
Mrs is a title used for a married woman or a widow. Mrs Stefan Germanman means she is married and her husband's name is Stefan. Mrs Dana Germanman means she was married and her husband is now dead.
Mrs is typically used in social settings.
Ms is a title used for a woman. It is not used with the woman's husband's name. Thus, Ms Stefan Germanman is wrong. Ms Dana Germanman is right.
Ms is typically used in business settings.
Miss is a title for a woman who has never been married. It has fallen out of general use. It is typically used only for prepubescent girls.
Exception: Across the South, it is common for elementary school students to call their female teachers Miss (First name); for example, Miss Kimberley, Miss Agnes, Miss Julie. This applies regardless of age or marital status.
As with everything else in English, there are many exceptions to these rules.
My mother tongue is Spanish and I find English to be easy to learn because the verbs are easy to conjugate. Basically they dont'n change. And most nouns have no gender and there is a single article for all ('the') whereas in Spanish, as well as German and all the roman languages, you have to learn the gender of every noun and the corresponding article. When I started to learn English I used to find British much easier to understand but later on I could pick up American English just as well.
What did you major in? I'd love to live in Germany after college but I don't know what kind of job I could get if I got a communications degree. Love your videos :)
I learned English, Latin and the basics of Italian and Danish. English was definitely the easiest, I was confronted with so much English online, in games, in songs and so on that it just came naturally. Latin started out fine but became very hard after a year of learning. Italian and Danish are not as easy as English but not that hard either. The strange thing is that every language got harder the longer I learned it, except English - that one just didn't require actual work anymore after the first year.
It is interesting in my case, that i can nearly perfectly understand english and read in english, but I have enormous problems with writing and speaking. (Btw. Im from germany)
Keep learning n watching UA-cam videos teaching English n u will find it much easier I promise💪
English is one of the easiest languages to learn in my opinion. I have much more difficulties with french than with english, i don't know it just doesn't seem to work with me.
You're not alone. French can be a monster, especially with alle the 's' you don't pronounce.
Englisch hat sehr simple Grammatik, insbesondere im Vergleich zu den romanischen Sprachen
Hello! I am so happy to find your channel! Thanks to Easy German.
I want to study in Germany. I have just started learning German. It is so different than any other language I've dealt before.
Now you will be my inspiration)) Thank you
Hey! Thanks so much purplena14 :D If you have any specific questions about studying German/moving to Germany let me know and maybe I could answer it in a video for you!
Hey! I think a good idea is to film a video about your tips and sort of recommendations on studying German. May be you have your own approach, some useful links and books, ways to deal with grammar, etc. Hope you have a nice day :)
You read my mind :D I JUST finished writing a script about how I learned German. Really glad to get the positive feedback that someone would be interested in hearing about it! I'll go back and re-read it, and perhaps add some useful links and books like you mentioned. Thanks! :) You have a nice day too.
Still offended by the complete omission of the UK from the opening map! :p
Don't be hypersensitive. The Brits have much more to fuss about than a UA-cam opener.
And fuss they DO!
actually i had more trouble learning german (being german) than learning english :D the german grammar drove me nuuuuuuuts, whereas english was always a necessary tool to understand what happend in the internet when i was 14 (2008). i also think i basically learned english in youtube listening to vlogs of us-teenagers' daily-life. thats what i love the internet for and this is exactly how i learn spanish right now
Hey there! The Walking Man is really cool. BTW, in Frankfurt a.M. we have the Hammering Man.
3:41 "the hands of the Gods", yes, another person out there who knows there's more than one Deity. XD Gods bless. :)
Dana maybe you couldclear up something which has bothered me for some time.The first is the seemingly confusion of Shhhhhhh... and Pssssssssst i have always been taught to use Shhh when you want to politely ask someone to be quiet and Pssst when you want to get someones attention nnear you or perhapswant towhisper something in their ear. I haveoften seen on signs inside a bldg the word psst tosay that all should be quiet. Have you alsso noticed this?
It is easy, because the grammar is not so hard and also it is spoken all over the globe, so I have a lot more motivation to learn it, than to learn a language that is only spoken in a little area. I need English to comment this video for example.
As a native English speaker, learning French my answer to the question has to be, Yes! Because of all the Influence other languages have had on English.
What credentials do you need to teach in Germany? I love Munich. I'll be back soon... :)
Good question...in Munich it's usually best to have a bachelor's degree (pretty much in anything! lol), and then some form of teacher training, so for example the TEFL/TESOL certification or other. In the next few weeks I'll be publishing a more in-depth video with that kind of information, but I hope this helps for now :)
I learned Spanish and Russian... English is really easy in comparison. And I think it is much easier than German.
Theacher you have a velvety voice. I like so much
I would like to have a teacher as pretty as you :-*
English is easy. It uses european letterS, there is almost no letter you do not pronounce and no declination. And the order of phrases are pretty logical : Subject/verb/complement. In comparison I know french, german and I study chinese and japanene : English is definitely the easiest one !
I learned English, German, French, Latin and ancient Greek in school (I'm Dutch). I don't think English is hard to learn, not only because the grammar is very easy, there's English everywhere around us, so it's not hard to practice. For me, German wasn't that hard either, because a lot of German words are very similar in Dutch. However, the grammar is quite a different story (Dutch doesn't have cases) and because the languages are so much alike, it's easier to make mistakes. Sometimes I think I know what a German word means, but it can turn out to have a totally different meaning (for example 'bellen' in German means 'barking' but in Dutch it's calling someone on the phone).
I didn't think French grammar was that difficult, but the vocabulary and pronunciation were harder to learn.
Ancient Greek was hard because of the alphabet, the weird grammatical structures and tenses and there were just so many exceptions.
However, I would say Latin is BY FAR the hardest language I learned. The grammar is extremely complicated, but very logical once you get it (just like maths). Luckily we only had to translate from Latin to Dutch and I was actually pretty good at it :D
My German dad came to Canada in the 60s and learned English with no formal training by watching TV, reading comic books that had lots of pictures and little dialogue, working with English speakers and above all marrying my English speaking mother! But here's a funny story from when he first came and was relying on a dictionary to help him communicate. As you know, Germans pronounce 'ie' as long e, and 'ei' as long i. English is made up of many other languages including German, French, Nordic and Latin. Therefore, 'ie' in English can be pronounced many ways depending on what word it is in. Receive is pronounced as long e, but weigh is pronounced like long a, and pie is pronounced as long i. See how confusing it could be to a non-native English speaker? And those are just a few examples! So, my dad wet into a restaurant to order pie, and said it this way: "I would like a piece (long e) of pie (long e). But he pronounce pie as pee and everyone laughed as the waitress teased him and kept asking over and over what he wanted. That day, he learned a valuable lesson in the variances of ie and ei.
bei dem deutsch in den anderen "wanted adventure"videos hätte ich total t(r)olle Wörter benutzt wie jöölboom und sehr viel wie und wer (false friends) etc.
In my opinion English is a really easy language to learn. I also learn French and I think compared to English it's so much harder to learn.
Does anyone here know about the other way around? I mean if I went to America as a native German could I just go to a school and ask them if they needed a German teacher or how would that work?
+MellyMorphia Normally you would need 3-5 years of university and in some cases would need to be certified, especially if you were going to teach special needs students...a tutor however is more lenient, and also more like Dana described her experiences, teacher is the wrong word here.
Please come teach me and my son German :P
I think that learning English is slightly easier than learning the average language, because its grammar is simpler than those of the inflected languages, and those using several different cases, such as German and Latin. But, it is more difficult than Spanish or Dutch, because it uses many spellings that do not match the spoken words, and it has thousands of exceptions to grammar and spelling rules. Spanish has almost no exceptions. Everything follows the rules. Once you know the rules, everything is easy. Dutch is also always spelt exactly as it sounds. Danish has an even more simple grammar than English, but it has 23 different vowel sounds, many of which are almost impossible for a foreigner to reproduce. it also has a VERY small vocabulary, as compared to English or German, and so, a foreign learner must learn all the differences in word order and voice tone, to understand how the nuances of how to communicate on a higher level. I speak Dutch and English, and have been living 2-5 months per year in Deutschland over the past 35 years (5 years in Bremen 30 in Muenchen) , and yet, I still am not completely comfortable in speaking German. I can get along and make myself understood, but cannot hold long, complicated conversations, and there are still things I don't understand. I am much better in Plattduutsch, as the word order, idiomatic phrases and word spellings and meanings are so much closer to Dutch than those of Hochdeutsch. My Spanish is better than my German, and, yet, I have spent much less time in Spain, using it much more in Los Angeles.
How did you start your freelance teaching in Germany?
What is the curicullum these days for English? Do you have to teach BE or are you allowed to teach AE ?
English is - I think ist is a fact- one of the easiest languages. It Hand Neapels no capitalization, verbs and adverbs are not conjugated to the object only to tempus and mode. Most verbs arme regular. There is only one article, etc. etc.
hello. so do u think its easier to learn german or spanish overall? proninciate , write it. :)
As a student I can confirm: Having Access to some source of coffee is neccessary
Oh yes, English is not easy to learn. I will try very hard to improve my skills.
I like your channel very much because you're an English teacher, you made many great videos on youtube, so I can learn from them.
The best part of it is, your teaching is for free ( here on youtube ).
Oh yeah, " for free" that's my favorite price. ;-)
That's my favorite price
haha I think that's everyone's favorite price!! :D Thanks for watching! Glad they're helpful too.
Oh , yes, they are very helpful for me. Thx.
Can you teach children for the language schools?
Is English a hard language to learn?
After learning 3 other languages, I'm very glad that English is my mother tongue. I can't imagine trying to learn it as a foreign language because so much of it just doesn't make any sense.
no, it's easy. It basically doesn't have any grammar...well it does, but...verbs for example....there's no conjugation.
I learnt Spanish, French and English in school...my English teacher wasn't the best. Sometimes I wonder how I even speak English now. But out of those 3 languages I took in school, English is now the one I'm best at. I understand pretty much everything and I'm pretty fluent
Hello Dana,
as an English teacher you're very talented and I am sure you do a great job.
Have you thought about teaching English many thousends of students online ?
I mean as an English podcaster.
It is fun, studends would love it and you could make a lot of money.
MfG Jan
Would you rather say something is "hard" to learn or "difficult" to lern?
It's so hilarious how in your intro England is simply not there.
English is most certainly the easiest language I've learned. The most difficult was french, ´cause despite of the Portuguese (my native language) Latin origin the structure is waaaaaay different. I guess, also, that English is easier because we have more contact with it through music, videos, shows,etc.
English speakers are generally good at making sense out of what people speaking very poor English are saying because we hear so many different accents, In fact, if we don't understand somebody speaking very bad English we apologize. So I tell people struggling to speak English--Give it your best shot and we will sort it out
I'm a native English speaker and I learn German. I've learnt that English is probably the only language where people can learn it, speak it in some what of a wrong way but we still understand them and they can get on with their lives in England. However, if you mix words up in German, the sentence means something completely different and that means that you couldn't really get on with it because you'd sound idiotic all of the time! English, I'd say, is easy to learn to speak but learning to write is harder.
Much easier then french or russian :).
And a much better chance to use it repeatedly.
For whom?
+Pi Niata For me as a german at least
I Learnt English because my parents spoke it..good luck to foreighn speakers..
wow, we had no idea that teaching English is so much fun! :)
It is! It's definitely a lot of work, but it has its perks too :)
Learning spoken English is easy, and I've seen immigrants become functional English speakers in less than two years. Learning written English is rather difficult. Many native speakers still haven't mastered it by adulthood. Personally, in addition to math and science and art and other subjects at school, I had seven years of spelling (in addition to grammar and composition). And I don't think anyone can learn the entire vocabulary in his or her lifetime. It's rare for me, but I still occasionally come across a word I've never seen before, and I'm now in my forties.
well i'm German and i think in general English is a lot easier to learn than German because of the grammar and the conjugation for example :) but especially between these 2 languages is a huge gap according pronunciation and intonation so that's, i guess, why it's hard for both sides to learn the other language
I also think that overall English grammar seems pretty uncomplicated compared to some other languages, but I'm a native speaker, so I figured I'm also a little but biased lol Spelling is the one thing that I know is trickier in English though! You never can be sure how a word is spelled English...
Did you teach in the Cambridge Institute in munich?
***** No, not there. I taught at several schools, for example Inlingua.
+Wanted Adventure
Did you try to become a "real" teacher for regular German schools?
I had my first native speaker as teacher when I attended an university.
Wether English is a difficult language to learn is not that easy to answer. I wouldn't say it's hard, however we also have to learn English from the age of 10, so it might be a hard, I just haven't noticed it because I've started so young. And the younger you are the easier it is to learn a new language. I'm Dutch, I like to say that I'm pretty fluent in English, I'm good at understanding German, but I have some problems speaking or writing it. And I know a little French. When Someone talks to me in German or in French, I translate it in my head. However I don't do that with English, I just understand it. So it seems like English is easier, but maybe I'm just used to it.
I could teach Munich students the Italian language. The question is, where do you find them...? I have never done anything freelance. (Shame on me...)
Hello, i know your channel because i see easy language channel, i study german, i like so much, but i have more facility with english, my native language is portuguese, i will follow you now, tchuss
Thanks for following :) Welcome!
Just one tip for your students. Stop thinking, start talking.
Building a thought and a sentence in German first, just to dumb it down till it fits English isn't fun.
Insert some Mark Twain quotes about these two languages here and you see my point.
Auf dem Globus fehlt Großbritannien und Irland.
Hi
I want to know how u got the job?
English is a very simple language, way easier than German, French or Portuguese.
English is a pretty easy language to learn, if there is any easy language. Especially Germans should be happy as English and German are quite related. Of course this was not what I saw when I had to learn English at school ;-P I was really bad!
But now that I have learned more languages with a more difficult grammar, I think I should feel happy that English is the worlds language and not Korean or Hungarian which are waaaaay more difficult.
I adore asian people being fluent in English as it is so far away from their native tongue.
It would be great if everyone in Germany speaks English ;)
as a finnish/swedish speaker all indoeuropean langwitshes are easy to speak but theres no logic to the selling, in finnish every letter is pronaunst so you just write what u say...
spelling sorry...
+Henrik Eskola Yes, you are right about English spelling not being logical, but English grammar is the easiest grammar of the European languages. Do you know what a 'Spelling Bee' competition is ?.....'Spelling Bee's' only make sense in an English speaking country !.
I think Latin and german are so much harder to learn than english
oh yeah, I have heard that Latin is HARD!! I only know how to count to 10 in Latin, and that's not too tricky lol but I've heard it's a really complicated language.
Wanted Adventure okay now that's funny, I don't know how to count in latin even though I learned it in school for 5 years and got the "Latinum" xD
If you ever think about learning latin (which I doubt you will ^^), really don't xD I used to love it the first year but then I stopped learning for once and now I just hate it... I'm lucky I passed the school year with an "4" and because of that got the Latinum, because to be honest I barely know anything anymore about it, now a year later :D
The grammar is so freaking hard and you can't even train it by talking to other people in it because this language is... well pretty much dead..
Wanted Adventure 1, 2, and 3 decline out in Latin but all the other numbers don't which is weird
English grammar is easy, close to nonexistent. A rudimentary case system for pronouns, that German based learners soon know better than the natives...
But spelling is soooo irregular. Not that hard, just has to be learned with every word.
Vocab: soo varied in English. You have Anglic, Saxon, Norse, Latin, Old French, even some Celtic languages, to draw from. So there are often completely different words for the same thing used in slightly differing nuances. Not all that difficult, just very rich.
And what's really hard are idiomatic expressions. English is a very idiomatic language. German has its share of idioms as well, but one has to accept that they don't translate. So there is this whole slew of constructs that consist of more than just one word, and you just have to learn them just like vocabulary.
Everyone in the comments is saying how bad the are at English and they write these huge paragraphs and yet their English is great (spelling and grammar wise)
They* not the
Ich wäre damals froh über so eine hübsche Englischlehrerin gewesen :D
Easy is rather easy to learn, what is way harder is the german language with all the traps it has
English is pretty easy compared to Latin or Arabic :D
English is the easiest language I have learned so far :-)