From Dutch -> Germans the genders are the same for most words, only Dutch has gendered (male/female) and neutral as genders, German has male, female and neutral, so I imagine they have an easier time of German.
That said, learning German pronunciation is much easier than English for non-natives, it mostly follows how it is written (you do need to know if two words are combined as that gets enunciated) whereas in English the spelling is a total mess vs the actual pronunciation.
The official German they teach in most places is more in line with itself too, with English there's British English, American English and then Canadian, Aussie, Kiwi which lean more towards BE but with some borrowed AE elements.
Well, it is certainly harder to learn English pronunciation than German pronunciation (for speaking). From any written German word, even completely unknown, I can produce a sound that a German speaker can recognize. It is straightforward. But it does not work the other way. German has so many dialects, that it is often completely incomprehensible to me when spoken by natives. On the other hand, English dialects are much easier for me to understand. I sometimes have to "calibrate" my brain when I hear some strange English dialect, but it rarely takes more than a few minutes to get used to it.
But it may be a learned skill. I use English professionally on daily basis and I communicate with people from everywhere. I use German only in my free time and I can always speak with Germans in English.
By the way, there are even Czech dialects that I can barely understand (I am a native speaker). And the Czech Republic is a small country.
I think the dialect thing is a native speaker advantage however, but yes, German dialects tend to use a lot of different actual words not just different pronunciations.
English has pretty crazy dialects too for non-native speakers to need to try and interpret, but they're very spread out - the UK has a bunch, the US has some in the south, then there's India, Australia and New Zealand. I know a lot of Germans that really struggle with Australians.
German dialects are concentrated in Europe in three countries mainly and native speakers can generally understand each other - the harder dialects between the countries ofc tend to understand the easier ones but not so much the other way around, but most Germans will understand all the other German dialects within Germany, even if they don't get all the ones up in the mountain villages in Switzerland.
I'm not debating the international usefulness, but I think that's partly independent of difficulty - French used to be the lingua franca and I personally find it horrid, native speakers never seem to pronounce words the same way as you'd expect, they just cut off the endings, and they reuse the same word for a dozen totally different meanings, worse than English does.
Learning German is however much harder than learning English. I do not see much logic there. For example noun genders are completely nonsensical.
From Dutch -> Germans the genders are the same for most words, only Dutch has gendered (male/female) and neutral as genders, German has male, female and neutral, so I imagine they have an easier time of German.
That said, learning German pronunciation is much easier than English for non-natives, it mostly follows how it is written (you do need to know if two words are combined as that gets enunciated) whereas in English the spelling is a total mess vs the actual pronunciation.
The official German they teach in most places is more in line with itself too, with English there's British English, American English and then Canadian, Aussie, Kiwi which lean more towards BE but with some borrowed AE elements.
Well, it is certainly harder to learn English pronunciation than German pronunciation (for speaking). From any written German word, even completely unknown, I can produce a sound that a German speaker can recognize. It is straightforward. But it does not work the other way. German has so many dialects, that it is often completely incomprehensible to me when spoken by natives. On the other hand, English dialects are much easier for me to understand. I sometimes have to "calibrate" my brain when I hear some strange English dialect, but it rarely takes more than a few minutes to get used to it.
But it may be a learned skill. I use English professionally on daily basis and I communicate with people from everywhere. I use German only in my free time and I can always speak with Germans in English.
By the way, there are even Czech dialects that I can barely understand (I am a native speaker). And the Czech Republic is a small country.
I think the dialect thing is a native speaker advantage however, but yes, German dialects tend to use a lot of different actual words not just different pronunciations.
English has pretty crazy dialects too for non-native speakers to need to try and interpret, but they're very spread out - the UK has a bunch, the US has some in the south, then there's India, Australia and New Zealand. I know a lot of Germans that really struggle with Australians.
German dialects are concentrated in Europe in three countries mainly and native speakers can generally understand each other - the harder dialects between the countries ofc tend to understand the easier ones but not so much the other way around, but most Germans will understand all the other German dialects within Germany, even if they don't get all the ones up in the mountain villages in Switzerland.
I'm not debating the international usefulness, but I think that's partly independent of difficulty - French used to be the lingua franca and I personally find it horrid, native speakers never seem to pronounce words the same way as you'd expect, they just cut off the endings, and they reuse the same word for a dozen totally different meanings, worse than English does.