Why German is a hard Language.

" Berling"
Five reasons why learning German is hard…
1. Because you can say the same thing in about 500 different ways
German has a very rich lexicon. This is partly due to its incredible ability to create new terms through Wortbildung, literally, the building of words. As a sort of creative exercise, different words and nouns can be joined with one or more suffixes. Furthermore the French cultural domination of the 18th century spoiled the German language and influenced the expression of certain concepts from the time. When then Romanticism and its underlying nationalist ideology spread throughout Europe in the 19th century, certain linguists quite literally invented 100% German words to convey those same expressions (some examples include: division= Aufteilung, definition= Bestimmung…).
The result? Several things in German can be said with two completely different words that actually have the same meaning. The choice of the word will then depend on the context and stylistic criteria. Unfortunately, this richness in choice applies also to whole sentences and expressions.
Thus even if you have been studying German for 10 years and know of 5 different ways to ask “how are you?”, be sure that a native speaker will come to you one day and employ that 6th way that you couldn’t even begin to imagine it existed.

2. Because the spoken language is terribly different from the written one
Yes, this is probably the most interesting, not to say terribly frustrating, aspect of German: no matter how well you know ALL the possible grammatical rules, the gender of thousand of nouns, the sentence structure etc… most likely the you won’t be able to understand one thing from your first conversations with a German, in particular in informal situations. The spoken language has in fact a name for it’s own, the so called Umgangssprache (vehicular language). Its lexicon has even been assembled in dictionaries, and holds the peculiarity of being transversal to dialects.

What characterizes the spoken language is that array of small words that have absolutely no meaning on their own and that Germans use to give a tone to the sentence (a bit like hand gestures for Italians) such as mal, schon, halt, doch… The use of these words will immediately separate a native speakers from who, regardless of how fluent they may be, learned German as a second language. There is then the tendency to ask „Wo kommst du her?“ and „Wo gehst du hin?“ as opposed to the common „Woher kommst du?“ and „Wohin gehst du?“. To our delight, Germans also like to liven up the language with particular expressions and to the universally known “Wie geht’s?” they will probably prefer a „Wie läuft’s?“ or a „Wie ist es?“…