Can you speak German?

I casually studied German from a young age (took some rudimentary after-school classes in elementary school). I also took German class for all four years of high school. My great-grandmother was a Black Sea German (German ancestry, but born and raised in Odesa, USSR) who spoke both German and Russian, so I heard it growing up but my mother was not fluent and could only understand some of it. Needless to say, it was never spoken in our house. My grandmother's first language was Russian, but she and her siblings primarily spoken German for most of their lives, though they became fluent in English after immigrating to the US post-war.

I remember bits and pieces of the language, but it unfortunately didn't stick with me. I decided to study Spanish in college and for some reason I retained a lot more of it, despite the fact that German is technically closer to English. As with most languages, it gets much more complicated as you start learning verb conjugations. I remember having some difficult with it during my senior year of high school in the upper-level German classes.

I would say that it's probably not any more or less difficult than a number of European languages, but it's not easy. When I was in graduate school, I took a seminar on Old French literature and language which included a lot of translation work. That was probably the most difficult language I've personally studied.

Ein bisschen

[quote]Can you speak German?

No. Hope this helps.

German is too brutal for speaking.

I studied it right through school, along with two other foreign languages. What is hard about German: the grammar is demanding, and the less you know of the rules of English grammar, the harder it will be. So if you want to learn to write it accurately you've got a slog ahead, and even to speak it you'll get endings wrong.

What is easy: the words are pronounced as they look, once you learn what the umlaut accent means, and their pronunciation is crisp, so if you know most of the words someone is saying you will be able to hear them clearly (not so in French). The intonation pattern is very like English (as opposed to French, where it's very different). The order of words in most short sentences is the same as English: in longer structures the verb goes at the end of the clause, but that's more something you're unused to rather than really hard, so it's straightforward once you've done it a few times. A lot of English words come from German, so you may even be able to figure out words you haven't learned.

In other words, learning to have a conversation in German is relatively easy, so long as you accept you'll probably be putting the wrong endings on various words. But they'll understand you and you them. Learning to write it accurately is hard but reading it is less difficult.