Learning German in High School

While in high school I took three years of German and became fairly proficient. I liked the classroom setting because if I had any questions I was able to ask. Also, receiving homework and having a book was helpful.

I don’t think that I would be able to use an audio tape or CD and receive the same experience. The hardest part for me, and I think a lot of people, was the sentence structuring. Most languages structure their sentences "backwards", and that is very confusing. Having the action before the subject is difficult to grasp and also difficult to understand when someone is speaking.

Also, the idea of putting gender to objects is very hard to grasp. In German there are three versions of 'the'. One is feminine, one is masculine and the other is neutral.

I think the easiest part of learning German was the alphabet, since it is so close to ours. The letters just have different sounds, and they use the umlaut over vowels to show long and short. Also counting was easy.

I have used German just for fun since I haven't actually been to Germany. I have a German friend that I am able to talk a little bit to and also I talk to the people that I took German with in high school in German. I think that overall German is probably one of the easier languages to learn since the alphabet is similar. Also, many of our English words are the same or similar to German words.