I’m lucky enough to be learning German, though I’m afraid I’m not very good. When I was in high school I spent hours memorising verben, but now I’ve not got the aptitude or the patience. My tutor gets exasperated because I’ve learned some handy answers to all her questions in the lesson.
Mostly everything seems to take the dative, though I’ve little idea what that means. You can usually fluff gender – when spoken, mein sounds terribly similar to meine. Sometimes she catches me out, but not often.
Homework, however, I can do. German writing is an exercise in thinking like a compiler – for the most part the language is so uniform and regulated that you can solve most problems through a process of pattern matching and unification. Cui Bono, though.