As I've already told you, I have very little Hock Deutsch (High
German) and I am taking lessons to remedy this. Add to this the fact that
the Swiss speak Schwiezertüütsch ( a local dialect about as related to German
as Australian English is to UK English) and you 
begin
to see my difficulty.
But that's not all. There is the problem of learning German itself. Lets take gender to start with I'm used to the Neuter gender from English and the use of Masculine and Feminine gender from learning French at School so I thought coping with German grammar would be straight forward. No! The Germans have mixed all three forms on a largely ad hoc basis with little or no logic. For example a young girl is neuter but a young woman is feminine. OK, just learn it you say, I agree. But.........then there is the German sport of confuse the foreigner. How? Easy, instead of writing each word separately so some one with patience and a good dictionary would have a chance glue some of the words together sowhenyoulookatthemtyou can't tellwhereonewordends and another begins. Then there are split verbs so you don't know what someone is saying until you get to the end of the sentence. Oh, and don't forget the words like NOCH which change their meaning according to context or sometimes (and here's the killer) have No Meaning but are just put in for emphasis. Why?
All this has led to an experience my wife and I call fondue brain, because that's how you feel sometimes at the end of a session. A brain made of melted chesse trying to drip out of your ears.Interestingly enough you get a great deal of sympathy from the Swiss, who know the problem having had to learn Hock Deutsch themselves, Swiss German having no written element to it. As a result we are repeatedly told the English is a much easier and more forgiving language to learn by people who should know.
