German v. Russian

[Mr. Smith]

Die deutsche Sprache.

Was fuer ein schwerige Frage. Ich liebe Russisch auch.

[Mr. Smith]

I studied Russian for multiple years in college and used to be able to speak it reasonably well. I am also Bengali so by definition I am a russophile. I have no similar connection to German.

Both German and Russian have productive case systems, which is good, but word order is freer in Russian than in German, which is a point in favor of Russian. In both languages gender and case interact with each other, but I find German more difficult to parse in this respect than Russian, mostly because German articles are confusing. Russian avoids this issue by simply not having articles.

The articles mean fewer noun endings, which are ridiculous in Russian [and Icelandic ftm, but that's for a different thread].

And free word order is not necessarily a positive, when it means so many endings [or prefixes] to learn.

And frankly, it makes Yoda-speak lose its effect.

[Mr. Smith]

As a native Russian speaker, obviously Russian, though I must say I didn't realize this thread would be about languages until clicking into it.

I studied Russian for multiple years in college and used to be able to speak it reasonably well. I am also Bengali so by definition I am a russophile. I have no similar connection to German.

Both German and Russian have productive case systems, which is good, but word order is freer in Russian than in German, which is a point in favor of Russian. In both languages gender and case interact with each other, but I find German more difficult to parse in this respect than Russian, mostly because German articles are confusing. Russian avoids this issue by simply not having articles.

The articles mean fewer noun endings, which are ridiculous in Russian [and Icelandic ftm, but that's for a different thread].

What makes them so ridiculous? Plenty of Uralic languages have many, many more cases than the likes of Russian or German.

It makes it far harder to figure out what a word does at the beginning of learning, compared to X word is here, so it's a verb, Y word is here, it's a noun. Much easier to make a mistake and be understood when you don't have to worry about agreements so much as your native tongue.

And frankly, I'm not touching Uralic languages anyway, though I'll note those languages cancel out the cases by being genderless.  But if I do dabble outside the Indo-Eurozone, it's gonna be either Korean or Thai, both of which I have far more personal connections to.