1e4e6 wrote:When I started German in school, I remember the class spending lots of time on the 4 cases, many students just trying to figure out how endings actually change on words based on what happens to them in the sentence. It was a bit of a linguistic "shock" because this sort of thing is completely alien to Anglophones, as when we were taught English, we usually do not change the endings (nor articles) based on if it is a direct object, indirect, locative, etc (An apple is on the table. I eat an apple = same article/ending).
Just saw this... I also found it shocking that it's the article that gets the endings, and the adjective/pronoun endings are often random. Still recovering from the shock, really
As for difficulty or similarity, maybe we can quote Erik Gunnemark's comparison (surely that's fair use?) It was just simple percentages, for example Portuguese/Spanish are above 90% transparent. It covers pretty much all the European languages, and I think it's a decent starting point. I can type that up if needed, and maybe we can add more comparisons/perhaps even make it less European centric.
I guess an article called "Are Chinese and Japanese similar?" would also be popular.