At school we learned French from day 1, then we added German and Spanish in (I think) the following year, and then later on we could drop either German or Spanish but we had to take French and either German or Spanish. I chose German and spent much of the next two years wishing I'd chosen Spanish. Trying to learn three languages at 13 years old is tricky, leading to some spectacular test answers - I wasn't the only one who got muddled once in a while and switched from one language to another in the middle of an answer.
Wow, I can't see the sense in expecting someone to learn 3 languages at once.
I'm very conscious how many people whose first language isn't English speak multiple languages and take the time to use them correctly, while so many people whose first language is English only speak English, assume everyone else will speak English, and assume that however badly they butcher the language it's OK because self-expression or something. I like to keep at least a few words in hand in other languages, although a lack of obvious situations to use languages day-to-day means they inevitably get very rusty. I find it interesting how other countries and cultures do things, even down to things like Germans putting the verb at the end and Spanish using the ¿ and ¡ symbols.
The verb at the end thing in German seems to be a case by case thing, which if I remember right comes from the languages from where it is derived (Greek and Latin from memory) - that is, the case, I mean. Infinitives like "gehen" (to go) or "besuchen" (to visit) go at the end of the sentence or phrase in order of their importance in the sentence, where as "Geh" (Go) or "Ich gehe" (I go) can be found near or at the beginning. I'm still getting the hang of it.
"Warum besuchst du deinen Bruder im Februar?" (Why are you visiting your brother in February?) is an example from a lesson I'm taking right now.
If you've got lots of time to learn you'll pick it up fast, especially if you're picking it up from multiple sources. Assuming you keep practising it there's no reason for it to go rusty like mine did. I suspect I could pick up a basic level of French, Spanish and German fairly quickly, if I just wanted to be able to muddle through in those languages - along the lines of "where is the post office?" rather than "I think the alternator in my car might have developed an intermittent fault".
Thanks! The language indeed holds some interesting challenges. It seems every noun has a gender (male/female/neuter) and it basically has to be memorized in order to say "the" correctly (Die,Der,Das) when referring to that noun...but also when referring to the noun in a certain sense. For instance:
"My brother, my father" - Mein Bruder, Mein Vater - notice the "mein" is the same but...if one of the nouns is the secondary or receiving noun...the "mein" changes to "meinen" for that noun:
"My brother loves my father" - Mein Bruder liebt meinen Vater.
These are examples of the little extras I have been stumbling over, besides remembering that certain letters/letter combinations make different sounds in English than they do in German. (For instance: V has an "f" sound, S has a "z" sound and so forth).
