I want to learn a Celtic language

That sounds a little confusing, at least it would be to me.

I think Welsh might officially be my last language... or at least the outer border of my language space. On the other hand, as far as I can tell right now, it might as well be an alien language, so in a sense any human language becomes fair game... Nope, no, thanks.

...I don't know where you got the info that German has flexible word order. It's true that the verb and the subject can change places in a sentence, but that change is very strictly regulated by the function of the sentence, and per function there's basically a single unchanging order, down to the sequence of adverbs.

And yeah, there's a lot of base cognates (words of same origin) with English (ich, geben), but the grammar can mess with you. I really consider English quite an unfortunate language to start off of with another. I briefly even became convinced that it should be classified as a creole, because of what Normans did to it. I mean, the loss of grammatical gender alone puts English-speakers at a big disadvantage with respect to most other Indoeuropean languages. As well as the reduction of the singular second person pronoun ("thou" - Shakespearean English, or German "du") and the subjunctive mood... Well, I'd better stop myself, before I get too excited.

On the other hand (before you run away scared), my native Russian has all these elements, and I still have barely any grasp of them (aside from "du" which is pretty natural) in German. It doesn't prevent me from very much enjoying entertainment in the language.

So this is the site I've been using to study Welsh (for all of one day), so I thought it would be right to share: https://unilang.org/resources.php?mo...ang=de&links=0 Well, specifically I'm using it as an absolute beginner, it might not be the right thing for you. Although I see that there's different kinds of lessons on that page.

Yeah, I don't know where I heard German having flexible sentence structure either, it's been a few days since I thought I heard it. English is a weird language, we just don't have the genders or any of that that other languages have. I know when I was taking Spanish classes gender really messed with me as did all the forms of "you" and "the" (think there was more than one form of "the"). I've noticed with German is a sentence will be translated and mean something else entirely from what each individual word means. Or having to rearrange words when translating to English, it's weird, and really hard to figure out the actual meaning of the translation.

Thanks for the website, I'm still an absolute beginner so it'll be helpful to me.

I would say it's naive to think that words in English could be literally substituted with ones in German; however in a way that's something I struggle with, myself. English comes to me naturally - when I think of a concept I can generally just say it. But in German I have a concept, and more often than not - a completely empty space for how it should be expressed... I guess it's a bit different from your difficulty: I think from many years of study my brain understands the futility of - and has given up on - literally translating words from one language into another. But then I get left simply without a way to express myself... The frustrating thing is, often those useful, but unguessable expressions (like phrasal verbs), consist of the few basic words that make up the, maybe, top 100 most common words of the language, that I 100% know... like in English the combination "make up" or the German "aufgeben" (which looks like a different situation because it's written as one word, but is kind of similar, because of how it's often used, and because its cognate in English is "to give up").

A kind of random thought I just had: do you play any musical instument? Increased linguistic ability often is thought to be associated with musicality (I think it has to do with nearby or overlapping areas of the brain). I suppose if you don't you don't. I don't remember if you've mentioned if you sing along with those German songs...

You're right in respect to thinking English words can be substituted for German words, I don't know what I was getting at with that, mainly that everything doesn't translate over exactly the I thought it would and it's confusing. I do understand that things won't translate over as well as I thought they would, some words may not translate over at all.

I do play two instruments (well haven't actually touched mine in a couple years), so it is interesting you mentioned that, musical ability and language learning/ability use similar parts of the brain. I can't sing so I don't actually sing to the songs (well I do lip sync if that counts).

I don't imagine I myself am a great singer, but it doesn't prevent me from bawling at the top of my voice along with my favorite songs... (Er, obviously not in public.)

A kind of tip I've wanted to mention - do you have any kind of translator extension in your browser (like simply Google Translate in Chrome, there's a similar thing in Edge)? I find it just increases my level of comfort (and consequently willingness) when exposed to another language where I get a translation with a simple double click in the browser.

I've been wondering more and more if there isn't a job out there for which the main duty is learning languages. I'm just bored senseless at my current one, which makes me wistful for a simple textbook, and for new and interesting languages, like Gothic, which is extinct, but apparently there are textbooks even for it... But, o je, as a German would say, das ist sinnlos. Or rather, of course there is a job like that, something like "university linguistics professor". Except I'm nowhere near that and barely scraping by in terms of money.

Well, I've got inspired to muse about how a language-learning video game would work, according to... how I'd like to make one... And at the same time I'm quite confident that it's an impossible challenge...

Anyway, the game presents you with the line "Wie heißt du?" You can click on each individual word and find out their literal translation "Wie" - "How", "heißt" - "are called", "du" - "you", and you can look at the translation of the whole sentense: "What is your name?"... Unbeknownst to you, based on what (if anything) you've clicked before giving your answer, the game estimates your proficiency. So if you had to click every word, it provisionally assigns you the level "absolute beginner". What it does with this information is adjust the text that it presents you with next. If you're an absolute beginner, you probably need those words repeated to you a few times, to remember them. So a character will present itself "Ich heiße Wilhelm." Then it'll repeat the word "heißen" several sentences later. It'll also continue checking whether you've clicked the word's translation again, and update your level and mastery of the word based on this information...

I don't know what sharing this idea does... I'm frustrated with my job, and frustrated with the impossibility of realizing this game, although in a different way, so maybe it's the fact that there is a dream there...

If I sing I do it when no one is home.

And I have the Google translate app on my phone, it helps a lot.

That would be a cool game, especially for people who want something more interactive than books. I'd play it, and I'm not much for video games anymore.

If there was a job where I would get paid to learn German (for what purpose, who knows), I'd take it. Linguist is the closest I can think of and you need an university education for that.

Also I see if you use Google Chrome, if you highlight a word or sentence it will show you besides copy/paste it shows you can translate it from the web browser, cool feature.

I'm going to act for a moment as if I've got a captive audience for my obsessive ramblings.

One of the biggest challenges for making that game is content: first, what it could be about, in general. I sort of understand that the people that would be interested in something like that would want buying groceries, booking a flight, renting a room... Things that I don't care about at all. I'm actually a fan of medieval history, or at least folklore... But even if I assume that as acceptable subjects, I actually need something more specific - that comes after "Ich heiße Wilhelm". And I've had a lot of difficulty with that. And not surprisingly - game writing seems to be one of the hardest areas, at least to do right.

But the most expensive area, I believe, is graphics (in terms of time as well as money, for those who have it). Or it could be extremely cheap - if it were an entirely text-based game. Unfortunately I don't find text-based games interesting... But then if there were any graphics, it would make sense that almost every word or concept have a graphic representation. You don't mention "Hund" without showing it and providing appropriate sounds... So there, any way I look at it, it quickly gets out of hand, at least at the limits of time, money, and sanity that I currently possess.

Well, you remember how I recommended the site context.reverso.net? I've kind of become disappointed in it. So I'd like to suggest another one - glosbe.com . For my needs it's better because it offers more languages (including monolingual definitions), and gets exactly the words I ask for (whereas reverso likes to fiddle with more rare words trying to fit them to what it has more examples for).

Also, I guess I'm suddenly in a better position to try and offer advice about learning your first foreign language... Because that's how I'm feeling with Welsh. Like I've said, I've for a long time learned languages that are more or less similar to those I already knew. But this Welsh is an entirely strange beast... Well, I'll offer advice once I actually find a method that works. Right now my attempts are kind of, well, lame, in the sense that they're limping along very shakily, and I'm hoping there's a better way.

Before I forget, a thought I had about the content of the language-learning game. Actually what's interesting and exciting for me shouldn't be specifically adapted for language-learning goals, but a regular story. For some reason (for good reason) I've latched on to the elements love, death, mystery, adventure, friendship, and betrayal...

A piece of German trivia that I've just learned - there's a tradition that a snack around 11 am sometimes contains beer or more often, as in the region Ostfriesland - tea. And incidentally, Ostfriesland turns out to be the region with the highest consumption of tea per person worldwide. Their specialty is tea with sour cream (Sahne, if I'm not mistranslating), which isn't mixed in but put in as a whole teaspoon, coloring the taste in a gradation towards the bottom. Also, Ostfriesland is one of the regions with the highest proportion of Low German speakers (or Platt, as its usually called) and in Ostfriesland Platt the High German verb "müssen" is "möten", which appear also to be some local nickname for the 11 am tea time... Or in some other way associated, it's my best guess after trying way too long to figure out what those guys said.

Cool website, bookmarked it for future reference, typed in the word "the" and got a lot of results, including sentences using it in German.

That's a cool bit of information, the tea with sour cream, well it must be an aquiered taste, not going to judge though.

What is the difference between a "high German" speaker and a "low German" speaker?

You can make the game anything you want it as it'd be your game, maybe mix practical and fantasy? Just thinking here, but I have no examples on how that would even work, sorry. Still a cool idea though.

That'd male for an interesting game, my mind goes to murder mystery though.

That's kind of a complicated question. There's a few pieces of information that can be helpful to tackle it. One is that I once came across a series on Netflix which for the language had Swiss German (or possibly just German and I uncovered the variety by myself). I couldn't understand it at all.

Then, you probably remember how I said that Dutch could be an acceptable middle ground between English and German. Well, I recently realized that there's even more steps, one of which is West Frisian. The phenomenon is called a "dialect continuum" in linguistics. If you moved from English to West Frisian, to Dutch, then to German, you'd find that you could understand each new language without much study after the previous one. And the transition is more or less geographic (English is to the very west, German is to the very east).

Except, there's gradations like that within Germany (and neighboring countries). I guess you'd call them separate languages. Unfortunately their speakers weren't inventive with naming (or rather I suspect there's a complicated history of politics and conquest involved). And so they are all "German" with an adjective. Or "Deutsch", which according to Wikipedia goes back to a common Germanic root which means simply "people".

Of course, it doesn't become a problem usually until pretty deep into the study of Germany and its culture. There you begin trying to specify "Hochdeutsch" for Germany's lingua franca. High German as the language is a little bit artificial and was in a sense crafted for this purpose in higher society (although that's not why it's called that). I believe it's High German because it's a distinguished member of the High German family of dialects, which is called that because it used to be spoken at higher elevations, closer to the Alps. Whereas the Low German family of dialects used to belong to the lowlands, along the coastline.

Hopefully, this helps somewhat, although I can't vouch for 100% accuracy, because I myself still struggle with this topic (and, I suppose, even professional linguists do). Of course, the are Wikipedia articles, but they could be overwhelming at this stage.

Another detail, I can somewhat understand Low German, without studying it, on the basis of my familiarity with High German... Although people speaking High German kind of like to rely on it to add color to their speech and for slang, so maybe I'm more prepared than I could be.

I've got some strange reservations (or I guess insecurity) about not making the "right" game for people... Anyway, I got this idea for a mystery: everyone speaks English, there's a murder, the main suspect only speaks German. You've got this thing (a gadget, I suppose) that allows you to communicate with her, and are given the responsibility to figure this whole thing out...

The problem is that, while I'm able to occasionally enjoy the mystery genre, my brain kind of refuses to work along those lines as a creator... Or I don't know, I guess you could also say, my brain doesn't find them innately attractive, so I never get inspiration for a mystery.

Thanks, makes more sense now that you explained it to me, I'll probably just end up learning standard German, at least that's my goal. I have many people on my Facebook that speak German (though none of them know I'm trying to learn it, I feat they would laugh at me and scare me away from learning it like one friend tried to do, he didn't laugh at me, just told me it may be too hard). Problem is when some of them post in German Facebook automatically translates it so I don't see the original post to see if I can recognize any words and then click on the translation. I don't know, I feel like I am setting myself up for failure with trying to learn a second language, but I'm going to try anyway.