The Awful German Language (1880)

I am not sure whether this can be objectively measured. All kids learn (at least) one language the natural way. I have the strong feeling that related languages will always be easier for them.

I speak English as a foreign language. I don't think articles in English are a challenge. It's the USA, but not the France. I can feel the cold or a cold and know the difference. I don't know many rules, it's mostly like I would use them in my mother tongue.

I have many colleagues, whose mother tongue does not know articles at all. If they write a page of text, there are often a dozen of mistakes related to articles to correct.

But it's not that I would just be smarter. I have spoken another foreign language daily for over 25 years. I speak fluently and can make myself fully understood. Still I make quite some mistakes all the time.

Every language has its pains. German using Sein and haven for auxiliary verbs in the past makes things way more complicated to learn. Not to talk about the irregularities of the past participle of verbs(that are not used in speech) that makes reading and writing way harder.

But if you focus your mind on that you will for sure stop learning the language because you will have an excuse. The fact is that you could learn it like Germans could too, and in the end English is part germanic.

And you can cheat. I learned Mandarin very fast, simplified and traditional script, which is crazy for most people because I cheated. I created my own software tools of spaced repetition software and because as a foreigner I did not have to follow the rules like Chinese nationals do.

For example, Chinese take the order of writing characters and the process itself as sacred. For Chinese there is only one way of writing a character, but it doesn't need to be that way, you can cheat and learn to identify most important symbols you find on the street fast. The order and calligraphy is secondary.

Ironically, the faster you use a language and can read things, the faster you will be able to write it. Just blocking yourself not being able to read a newspaper or novel because you can not write perfectly a symbol does not make sense.

The phonetics of Mandarin unless you create software to repeat and repeat and repeat every day is simply impossible for any adult foreigner, because we as children have not learned the basic sounds. German phonetics by comparison is trivial in a tenth of the time.

I don't know what you're trying convey in your examples though, because all the example have consistent pronunciation. Inconsistence pronunciation often because it is borrowed words from French (das Experiment (Ex-pe-ri-mo'n?)) or English (das Schedule, informal vocab.)

Correct, there is only en-ord and ett-ord and it has been so for centuries.

There are 3 personal pronouns (One of them less than 20 years old for politically correct language to describe either woman or man.) But grammatically all 3 cause declensions like en-ord, so they don't form a different grammatical gender.