• cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml
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    16 hours ago

    A lot more people speak French than German, even if this is declining as parts of Francophone Africa are trying to ditch French. It’s not going to disappear overnight from those countries. I wish this wasn’t the case since my French is much worse than my German, but French is still objectively more useful than German for the time being.

    • Kirbywithwhip1987@lemmygrad.mlOPM
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      16 hours ago

      Yeah, my French is terrible and I don’t think that I can actually understand a sentence, unlike German, which is weird considering that everybody was saying that German is way harder.

      • REEEEvolution@lemmygrad.ml
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        5 hours ago

        That comes down to romantic languages being more widespread. English is a edge case. It actually is a germanic language like german, but was influenced so much by french that it has more romantic loanwords than germanic ones. Furthermore, it got so simplified during its colonial era that most of what makes germanic languages precise (but a removed to learn) got thrown out.

        Meanwhile german got lots of latin influences, with plenty of loanwords from neighbouring languages, but the structure of sentences barely changed over time.