Silly question about languages

As an English-speaking, English gamer from England, I'm just over the puddle from Germany. They've got some RPGs and books that we don't have in England that I'm eager to play and/or read, plus it's always felt like a German version of a game gets so much more love and attention from the publisher/developer, and that their PC gaming market is stronger than the English one.

So I had a thought - Should I learn German? I know some people have done a similar thing with learning English via games/TV, and I'm wondering if anyone here has learnt a language in this way?

Oh, and any tips/nudges towards common sense are welcomed!

I believe it was cm that was threatening to do exactly that.

I'd suggest finding games with german voices with english subtitles... If possible to start with. Along with a very basic German book for the vocabulary. If you can just memorize basic words, which would be some of which you would hear quite a bit in the language then you will start recognizing some things.

Then continue with more complicated stuff.

My two cents.

German is not exactly a simple language. The habit to attach a gender to every noun can drive people mad. Is "ketchup" male or neutral?

Your advantage in England is that you have easy access to German material. DVDs and especially Blu-Rays often include German voices, if carefully chosen.

Genders and the articles tied to them (die-die-der, der-den-dem, and the set for neutral, which I can't remember, and I've probably screwed up the ones I think I do remember) was a major PITA. Other than that, German isn't too bad for an English speaker because your grammatical structure is similar to ours (or more accurately, we copied yours) and phonemes are similar.

Now, that year of Japanese that I took in college...

A pro is - n my view - that many English words and German words are similar.

There are several "false friends", though, like "become" - "bekommen". The English "become" has actually nothing to do with the German "bekommen", which means "to get, to receive".

I'm always astonished when I find - to my surprise - formulations that can be *literally* translated. There are not many of them, but they exist. Like "false friends", for example, or "he/she goes on my nerves".

I tried to learn japanese for this reason.

I gave up.

Learning a language to play games really was a larger hassle than I had expected it to be, especially when you need to learn a whole different way of thinking, completely reverse everything you know about flow of language and verbal communication as well as learning three alphabets to do it.

German might be easier.

German is not an easy language , i find it way more difficult than to learn English , specially the grammar is hell .

The grammar is more complicated, yes, because of the genders, and the 4 grammatical cases. And the prepositions governing the cases. "Durch, für, gegen, ohne, um ,wider", anyone? And the tendency to place all of the verbs at the end of sentences (thus german is somewhat similar to reverse polish notation) Still it's not too bad. And usually you get the meaning of phrases, even if you don't remember the grammar correctly.

Regarding the common words. I guess there are even more common words between the nordic languages and german. It's not always a benefit, though. Because there are also a lot of german-sounding-but-not-german words, and since it's more than 30 years since I studied german, it's a bit hard to remember what is what.

I like the language, btw.

But of course, I would recommend that all of you learn Norwegian, which is very easy (and you'll understand the swedes as well. And the danish - as long as they don't speak). If you do, you'll be able to play "the longest journey" in it's native language.

once english was just a subset of german with the anglos/saxons being germans after all. then they managed to get conquered by the french which in turn fucked up their language over the years. but with all the similarities english is still one of the easiest languages to learn for a german, so why shouldn't it work the other way round too?

Some people say Yoda sounds as if he was speaking German - from the grammatical point of view.
I haven' heard Yoda in English so far.

Thank you for the replies, everyone, they're very much appreciated. So the best advice is to just expose myself to German, and see if I can work out what something means? Once I get the basics, I'm sure I could move into the more grammatical areas of it.

Alrik Fassbauer said:

There are several "false friends", though, like "become" - "bekommen". The English "become" has actually nothing to do with the German "bekommen", which means "to get, to receive".

Click to expand...

I think I've heard "become" used in that manner in English, but if so then it's certainly a very archaic use of it.

Alrik Fassbauer said:

I'm always astonished when I find - to my surprise - formulations that can be *literally* translated. There are not many of them, but they exist. Like "false friends", for example, or "he/she goes on my nerves".

Click to expand...

I think I found that with French or Latin, but I can't remember exactly (It was a while ago).

For a start:

A list of similar words in English and German:

Liste ähnlicher Wörter Englisch-Deutsch

Ah, nice, HiddenX, didn't know that such a list actually exists !

Thanks !

I am learning German at this period. I read almost every day not to lost touch.
I find it really hard compared to English (perhaps it is also the age) but i think that if you really want to learn you will learn.
I've been to Germany some times now and i still remember many phrases. I guess regular visits will improve the level of your knowledge

I've just found - to my surprise - a picture in Wikipedia that uses a German word - and this pecific term is totally unknown to me in German IT terminology !

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Stachledraht_DDos_Attack.svg

It should be "Stacheldraht", by the way. The spelling is wrong.

Article on the *real* German "Stacheldraht" : http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stacheldraht