Quote:
Originally Posted by MonctonRad
It's why I can generally read a French newspaper with little difficulty, but I would never be able to speak the language with any facility........
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All the "intellectual words" (for lack of a better way to define what I'm talking about) taken from French make English really easier for francophones. Strangely yet understandably, "intelligent" is a low-level English word for us, while "clever" is a high-level one. There are myriads of such examples.
German is way more difficult not only because of genders (three, including "neutral") and declination (shared feature of Germanic languages and Ole English, abolished in Middle English IIRC), but also because there are plenty of fancy English words that are from French - just re-reading my post above, even as an Anglo without any knowledge of French, you might have picked up all of the following: impression, investi, officielle, erreur, critique, position, débat, démontrer, indirectement - which, in German, are likely all or nearly all going to instead be completely unfamiliar-to-francophones Germanic words.