German to English: is it hard?

I had the pleasure of interviewing a native German speaker and good friend of mine named Phil. English is his second language and I wanted to get a better understanding of his process of learning English.

What is your mother language?

“My native language is German. As far as I’m aware, however, the current linguistic consensus is that knowledge of another variety beside the standard is to some extent similar to having another mother tongue. So maybe I should say my native languages are Standard High German and Bavarian, even though I do not actively use the latter.”

When did you begin learning English? Why?

“In all of Germany, English is a mandatory subject in all secondary schools, so I started in fifth grade, after four years of elementary (primary) school, at the age of 10 or 11.”

What was the most fun about learning? What was the most challenging?

“Developing a solid grasp of grammatical categories is, I think, not the most exciting thing for the vast majority of kids, and I was no exception. In turn, being able to understand English songs or the voice acting and screen text in English videogames was definitely fun and rewarding.”

If you could give your younger self advice about learning English, what would it be?

“Keep doing what you’re doing, sport, I think it’s worked out reasonably well.”

What is your overall opinion about English? For example, compared to your mother language. 

“As regards grammatical structure, English has lost the bulk of its complexity, certainly in comparison to German. I would say English was by far the easiest language to learn for me, but only because German is probably the most ideal native language to have for a student in terms of vocabulary synergy.

There is no such thing as all-around universally easy language, however. Native speakers of non-Germanic languages have a noticeably harder time to reach quasi-native proficiency, and Western students in turn habitually struggle to reach upper levels of proficiency in Mandarin Chinese, which is arguably even more structurally simplified than English.”

When did you consider yourself fluent in English?

“I do consider myself fluent, but my written English is decidedly better than my spoken English. My actual level of performance when talking in English is, I feel, always somewhat hindered by nervousness and fear of embarrassment, and it certainly also depends on my familiarity with the particular subject matter.”

Since you are fluent, what are, if any, things you have still yet to learn or master? Is there a reason why?

“Apart from the aforementioned factors, there is obviously always the lack of a native speaker’s intuition and a certain amount of corresponding second-guessing of whether one can actually phrase something this way or that way.
As a student, I would also not truly speak the language so much as translate a sentence in my head and then recite it out loud. I am way past that point now, but the fact that my environment just isn’t one where I could get immersed into English as the default language will always limit the expression of my quick wit.”