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SilasBarta comments on Lesswrongers from the German-speaking world, unite! - Less Wrong Discussion
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Danke, dass du mich daran erinnern hast, warum ich hasse, dass Deutsch manchmal alle Verben zum Ende des Satzes bewegt.
Heh, I laughed at the "gesehen werden könnten", it brought back some memories; my grandfather (who was a Prisoner of War in Germany during WW2, but didn't hold any grudge) would complain about how in German you didn't know what was being said until the end of the sentence.
(Apologies to any German speaker offended by me making fun of their language - I assure you, French is way worse, I should know, I had to teach it. Ugh.)
How does learning English (and teaching, if you know) compare to difficulties in learning or teaching German and French?
I don't know from personal experience (I was raised in a bilingual family), but the impression I got was that English was a bit easier than French and German, something like:
Russian, Arabic > French, German > English > Spanish, spoken Mandarin > Esperanto
Hmm, that seems somewhat right (though it probably varies for individuals depending of the starting language).
One of the difficult aspects of English that native speakers tend to underestimate is verbs with particles, like "give in", "give out", "give up" etc. that all have meanings that need to be memorized separately even though they don't seem to require new vocabulary.
(I did briefly teach English in China, but I was a very bad teacher. I did a much better job teaching French, so now I'd probably find teaching much easier)
Eh, speaking as a non-native speaker, I don't remember ever having problem with those: you just treat it like learning a whole new word, with the added benefit you don't need to learn new spellings or new declensions, because they're all the same: "gave in" "gave out" "gave up"/ "given in" "given out" "given up". Simple!
One thing I did have trouble with was remembering that "in" goes with the year and the month, and "on" goes with days of the week. To remember that one I ended up having to visualize little houses for the years and rooms for the months, while each of the days were just tables.