I had three years of German in college. I understand that like its sister language English, a grammatical function need only be stated once and that something that appears vague (like -'s) in English is actually clear because there's only one possible meaning in a given sentence.
I came to German after Polish and Russian which have 6 cases (technically a 7th in Polish), nearly all of which have their own specific endings.
That said, German case endings drove me nuts because from my perspective they didn't seem to do the job of case endings! There are 4 genders (masc, fem, neuter, & plural) for nouns and adjectives. Adjectives come with both strong and weak endings. That's 8. Now you add another 4 for the nouns to make 12. Multiply that by 4 cases and you have a matrix of 48 possible endings. Polish and Russian would have prob about 40 unique endings if one were to make an analogy. How many does German have for those 48? SIX! -null/none, -e, -(e)s, -er

, -en, & -em. Yes, on a purely intellectual level I understand how 6 is sufficient for clarity and how the random sprinkling of the 6 amongst the matrix of 48 is actually NOT random. But I still felt like screaming, "Either get yourself some proper endings or do away with them entirely!!!" The only thing that helped me get it clear was repetition.
I thought verbs were fairly easy except for the penchant of piling up infinitives at the end of a sentence.
I'll admit to being bewildered by "you": du? ihr?, Sie (not 'sie')?, euch? because the 'job' of "you" is not divided up as it is in archaic English thou/ye, as the Slavic languages do, or as the Romance. It is something unto itself.
All that said, I managed just fine in Hamburg

Although some maintain that's cheating because the local dialect (Platt) is said to be 1/3 of the way toward English, lol.
Yes, Pantera, you may now commence to roll your eyes and laugh your ass off
