You are reading a single comment by @Oliver Schick and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed is a community of predominantly fixed gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London, UK.
This site is supported almost exclusively by donations. Please consider donating a small amount regularly.
@Oliver Schick
Yes. German has a fairly full set of systematic grammar, especially in the 'core' aspects of language. (For instance, Italian doesn't have much declension of nouns, but a full conjugation system for verbs. German has both--a complex and powerful noun declension and likewise excellent conjugation of verbs.)
I don't believe that any highly-developed modern language really has much 'less' grammar than another, but for learning other languages, it helps if grammar is systematic.
English, for instance, has very unsystematic grammar, and that makes it difficult for native speakers of English to learn other languages. I also think that while the rudiments of English are very easy to pick up, learning to speak it well is actually considerably more difficult than learning to speak German well (which by contrast is harder to get into, but that becomes easier once you've grasped the systematic aspects).
English has a couple of advantages over German on less 'core' issues, such as that it has to be quite precise about numbers of things or people (as it lacks other ways of making the meaning of noun references clear), or indeed has the continuous vs. simple form, which is a distinction that German only has in very rudimentary and unidiomatic form. English is also more precise about the sequence of tenses than German, etc.
English of course still has a lot of grammar that is a joy to study and understand (although I understand that in the past this used to be taught very much by rote, which is very ineffective). There are in every language ways of expression that other languages don't cover. I don't know them all, of course, but I've studied a lot of grammatical phenomena and there is essentially a huge number of possibilities, and no one language can cover them all--which is one major reason why it's so important to preserve a big diversity of languages. We're currently losing them at the rate of several a year.
I have a feeling that I've made very similar posts to this before, which I'm sure a quick search could turn up, so apologies for duplication and repetition.