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- "If you think this word order…
"If you think this word order is weird, try German."
And I was just about to praise the similarities between both the languages, an observation which proves very encouraging for native speakers of either language...
And now all I can say: Our word order makes sense. Really. And it wirklich feels all natural after a while. Ernsthaft. Ich schwöre Stein und Bein! :-D
8 Comments
One problem is that people use "weird" to mean both "unfamiliar" and "complicated/illogical". German word order is not particularly complicated, but is just unfamiliar to English speakers. Similarly there's nothing complicated or illogical about Irish's VSO order, it's just different from English. Czech, by contrast, has a very complicated word order, although most native speakers are blissfully unaware of this because they've never had the experience of trying to explain to a non-native speaker why one way of saying a sentence "just sounds better" than another. Norwegian doesn't strike me as particularly "weird" by either definition. One final note: Duo's teaching method tends to highlight word order differences between the source and target language because you are continually switching back and forth. It's less of an issue in real world situations, where you are generally speaking the same language you are hearing or writing the same language you are reading.
Definitely. Norwegian is too beautiful a language to skip the course halfway.
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Even halfway would be an improvement! I can't seem to wrap my head fully around Germanic languages despite the fact that English is one of them!
Irish word order is weirder because the verb goes first. And I see that you're learning Irish, so ok.
Yes, but I have to admit that Irish is one of the harder languages I have given a try so far.
