Compound nouns. The attraction of the German language to long nouns and english to germany is almost legendary. Agree, when you see words like Freundschaftsbezeugung, you immediately want to leave this language alone. In fact, these words are several separate words stuck together. Freundschaft is “friendship” and bezeugen is “confirm”. This is not as alien to us as it might seem – in Russian there are enough words like “screwdriver” or “high school student”, we just use much fewer letters.
Strict word order. The so-called “frame construction” always puts the predicate in second place in the sentence. The placement of the rest of its members is also subject to strict rules. You can not choose their order arbitrarily – this will either change the meaning of the statement, or even make it grammatically incorrect[1].
Complicated matching system. The German language has collected all the best from Russian and English and english to germany (or the worst, if you need to take it for assessment). Words change by number, gender and case, as in Russian. As in English, there are many auxiliary parts of speech, including articles – and they also need to be declined. There are only 4 cases – nominative, dative, genitive and accusative, but this is compensated by two types of articles – definite and indefinite. Therefore, each word can be declined in as many as eight ways, not counting its own plural, which is declined separately.
An unpredictable kind. In German, there are three genders that determine how we agree on the noun itself, adjectives related to it, and even prepositions with articles. The problem is that the gender of a noun most often cannot be guessed logically. The German “girl” – das Mädchen – is a neuter word, but “boy” – der Junge – is quite masculine. At the same time, the more universal das Kind is again neuter. There are also more terrible situations: the word See can mean “lake” or “sea” and at the same time change the gender – neuter or masculine, respectively.
As it is heard, so it is written. Fortunately, writing in German is based on the phonetic principle – if you hear the pronunciation of a word, then you will most likely be able to spell it correctly.
local variations. Although the German language is relatively uncommon in the world, it has enough dialects, and even within Germany itself. Thus, a German from Hamburg will have difficulty understanding a Bavarian. For foreigners who are just learning the language, this applies doubly.