[LeoXiao]

I love German. I am taking it in high school for three years and the class is awesome. So awesome in fact that I learned the grammar in a year and a half and skipped to the forth year. That being said, I've never talked to a single German in my life and my American accent is probably terrible. I can read it pretty well though and being stuck in Deutschland wouldn't seem too bad.

I don't understand all the people who say "German is useless." People learn German because they want to. Because it's cool. Only 10% of the kids at my school take German, and that's why. There are already enough people learning all the "useful" languages. Personally I like German because it sounds a lot better than those stupid Romance languages (except french) and is probably easier, given that English is also a GERMANIC language.

I already know fluent Mandarin and English anyway, so it's not like I'm starved of useful tongues.


EDIT: Better talk about the language itself.

I like the cases, especially the ones that English doesn't have, which are dative and genitive. I think it's kinda cool how the articles get changed so then you can take the subject and the objects and switch their positions while still having a good sentence.

The prepositions are kinda frustrating sometimes since they don't work the same as in English all the time, but again they are fun to learn and use. Conjunctive is harder when you get into the past tense but "hard" for me meant like two weeks as opposed to three days for learning/memorizing each case.

Now the hardest part about learning this language it getting the pronunciation right and learning vocabulary. I have a good memory, but also a short attention span and it's hard to memorize long lists of words and retain them permanently. It's also tedious to read German texts when there's other fun things to do (like watch anime!). The pronunciation is not hard to learn, but I find it difficult to make everything sound right when actually speaking. The "ö" and "ü" (though Chinese has "ü" so it's not that bad) are also difficult, particularly when put in between certain letters. The biggest obstacle is that I simply don't have enough chances to speak the language.