First, how many people here actually speak both German and English? Why is that, exactly? Just coincidence that so many more people are bilingual in these two languages than any other that the only foreign language forum we have is German?
Second... every now and then I like to go into the German forum and read a couple topics. I feel like I can read about 25-40% of them, or at least understand that many. And not specifically, I couldn't translate, but sometimes I can get the gist of it. I am ethnically part German, on my father's side, but he never spoke it and I doubt he even knew it. So it ain't that. I did listen to a bunch of Rammstein in the 90s (who that liked metal didn't?) but I bought a pocket German English dictionary (leatherbound, not electronic) and tried to study it, tried to translate the songs (but mostly ended up using the Internet).
So, is that natural? (I mean, if you're a linguist and you know these things.) I know English was bastardized from many other languages; words from other languages get taken and styled to look English, I guess you could say; e.g. "ja" becomes "yeah" (or "yes"), "hallo" becomes "hello". "Kindergarten" is one of the most famous examples; I'm pretty sure that means the same, maybe a couple vowels get the dots on top. Plus German has a couple extra letters, like the ß ("ss", or is it "tze" sound?). I bet you can guess which obscenity I learned that ended with that one, heh heh. (To be fair, I swore a lot as a teenager, and that word helped me compromise around little kids; I could use it in place of English obscenities, and they couldn't repeat it.)
All that being said, I wonder just how hard it is to learn German. There'd be no real benefit, financially, to learn it; an American would be best suited to learn Spanish - in 20 years it might be a second official language, like English and French in Canada. And I'd be fine with that, but I do like the sound of the language.
Thoughts?
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