English is a mess. You don’t know how to spell or pronounce a word unless you’ve seen it in print or heard it spoken (and have a good memory). German and Spanish, on the other hand, are reliable: Each letter is vocalized the same way every time. After hearing a word, you know how it’s spelled.
I never learned English, really; I assimilated it “at my mother’s breast.” In other words—as almost everyone does—I learned my native tongue organically, not academically. I learned it from hearing it spoken, first by my parents and slightly older (10 1/2 months) brother, then by other family members and friends, on the television, and later in school.
I’m sure the first “foreign” language I heard was Spanish. In Eureka, California, we had neighbors across the street who spoke Spanish. I had no clue what they were saying; they seemed to be babbling a thousand words per minute.
Since then I have learned German and Spanish. I do not know them nearly as well as I know English. I can read Spanish just fine, but can’t speak it well, and still can’t keep up with understanding it being spoken, either. I can read, speak, and understand German pretty well.
The difference between my relative mastery of German over Spanish are twofold (or threefold, if my wife is right):
1) I learned German thirty-six years ago, and have been learning Spanish for “only” the last nine years.
2) English is a Germanic language, whereas Spanish is a “whole different animal.” It’s only natural that a native English speaker would find the related German language much easier to learn than he does Spanish.
3) According to my wife, a third factor contributing to why Spanish is more difficult for me to learn than German is my age. I don’t know—maybe she’s right. Although I was a pre-Geezer (mid-50s) when I started learning Spanish, I’m solidly in the Geezer stage of life now.
But back to my premise that English is crazy and both German and Spanish are sensible:
If you didn’t know it already organically, how could you possibly know how to pronounce the words tough, though, and through? If you knew how to pronounce “tough,” you would think the other two are pronounced “thuff” and “thruff.” If you knew how to pronounce “though,” you would imagine the others are pronounced like “toe” and “throw.” Finally, if you knew how to pronounce “through,” you would deduce that the others are “too” and “thoo.”
English is full of that crap. But I love it. It’s my native language. When I read my favorite books, such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, in Spanish and German, they just don’t have the same appeal; much of the flavor is lost in the translation.
Great ideas are implemented in the German language, such as compound nouns (here are a few) and the capitalization of nouns.
Spanish has a couple of features that every language should adopt, namely one-letter words for the conjunctions “and” (“y”) and “or” (“o”), and tipping off the reader at the start of a sentence if it’s a question (such as, “¿Qué es eso pegajoso?”) or an exclamation (such as, “¡No se ha visto cosa igual que ese muchacho!”) by using “upside-down” versions of the question mark and exclamation point.
But still, crazy and inconsistent and confounding as it is, English is the language of my heart.