I studied German in high school and then as an adult I traveled to India and studied Malayalam, the language of the southern-most state of Kerala. I was surprised at how similar Malayalam was to German (in terms of grammatical structure, not vocabulary) and learned that it’s because of Hermann Gundert, a 19th Century German missionary who learned Malayalam (and a bunch of other Indian languages) and published its first formal grammar, more-or-less imposing German’s grammatical structure onto it.
As a German who speaks french: French is probably the easier language since you don’t need to declinate words and only really use 3 forms for time.
Yes but at the same time german writing system is almost phonetic while french have many way to write one sound.
Imagine writing queue and saying Kö
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It is not close to being phonetic. It is however quite consistent which is what you were probably thinking of.
I don’t get it. How is phontenic defined then?
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Nice. Is it a germanic langugage?
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TIL
I studied German in high school and then as an adult I traveled to India and studied Malayalam, the language of the southern-most state of Kerala. I was surprised at how similar Malayalam was to German (in terms of grammatical structure, not vocabulary) and learned that it’s because of Hermann Gundert, a 19th Century German missionary who learned Malayalam (and a bunch of other Indian languages) and published its first formal grammar, more-or-less imposing German’s grammatical structure onto it.
Damn those poor people lol
Fascinating though! Thanks for sharing that
As a swede who have studied both, I think French is way worse.