Whose Language Is Easier To Learn? The Not Terribly Surprising Answer Follows.

That would be the guy on the right, the Klingon Worf from the newer Star Trek series, and not Austrian singer Falco (from his Rock Me Amadeus video). The more I learn about German, the more frustrating it becomes-- there are times when the exceptions to the rule are as numerous as the "correct" use of the rule itself. For such an old language, I swear they were making it up as they went along, and nobody has gotten around to making the reforms in the hundreds (sometimes well over a thousand) of years since. Oh, there have been some reforms to the German language, but those were done by the Austrians and Swiss-Germans. Things like getting rid of something called an "eszet," which looks like this: ß, and is unique in modern western language. The other German speaking countries (including the tiny Principality of Liechtenstein, which follows Swiss-German language reforms) got rid of the eszet (aka "scharf S"), and replaced it with "ss," which is how it's pronounced. My research is far from complete, but I believe that the Germans themselves started to abolish this sometime in the late 20th century, but then stopped, so there are words that have the "ss" and words with the "ß." Then there's the whole ending-of-nouns thing: there are no less than 10 different ways to make a word plural-- jeez guys, ever heard of the letter s? The truly annoying thing is that there are are a distinct lack of shortcut tricks, nothing on the level of "I before E" type things-- you simply have to memorize everything. I call it brute force learning, and it's not fun.

I'm not a geek, but my frustration with German led me to look into made-up languages like Esperanto and Klingon-- where all of the mistakes, exceptions, and codified rules of world languages (and believe me, English is a major offender here) were identified and sidestepped to create something that was easier to learn. Not that I'll be going to Klingon class anytime soon-- my hair looks too damn good to cover it up with a turtle shell. But it is a growing language created by a team of linguists, with new stuff added all the time. So much so that a person can sing in Klingon-- like this nerd here: