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Cake day: February 17th, 2026

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  • German certainly has a steep learning curve in the beginning, but I would argue it gets easier if you’re an advanced learner. Most more complex words are just compositions of easier words, pronunciation makes sense, the complex grammar quirks are either not used in everyday life or irrelevant (nobody cares if your say der, die, or das for any noun that’s not Nutella).

    English on the other hand is easy to start but the learning curve never flattens. To pronounce a word correctly you often have to know the specific word beforehand or you’re lost (like with read, thyme, zealot, advertisement, …). To understand a new word you often have to look it up because compositional nouns are less common. That makes many new cool words but is less accessible.

    Japanese Kanji are complicated. Ask a Chinese person learning Japanese, they will give you a good rant. Or ask a Japanese person who has been living abroad for a few years, they often forget many Kanji and have to relearn them. Main reason imho is that a lot of this has grown organically and the world has changed a lot over the past centuries, so many things would be done differently today.