anastasia: I took two years of German in highschool, but I doubt if I know one hundred words. I got so discouraged with all the words for "the". People can complain about English all they want to, but when it comes to articles in English, there's just two. A definite one and an indefinite one; "the" and "a". Whereas German has at least five! Der, die, das, den, dem. and that's just for "the", "a" gets the same business too, ein, eine, einen, and things I can no longer remember. :) The whole business of gender for nouns seems ludicrous to me too. I guess it makes learning Spanish easy if you're already are used to having the article with the noun, as Spanish also has this gender and tense grammar stuff to deal with too. I wonder if the gender is the same in those languages? If not, then it might be hard depending on how many differences there exist. Here I just learn the word, like say the word is "table". That's it There's no masculine, feminine, or neuter to learn. It doesn't matter if it's now, tomorrow, or yesterday. Or if it's your table, my table, or somebody else's table. It's either that table, or any table.
I was told that Japanese doesn't even have articles. I'm willing to bet for a Japanese person, English might have that one thing easier to learn than German or French, but maybe not.

For me, German seemed like a needlessly complex language, but I'd say the main reason I didn't learn it was I had no one to speak it with. I should've taken Spanish. It's almost the main language around here in Santa Ana. It gets equal or even primary billing in a lot of places and venues. Plenty of people I meet daily don't speak English but know Spanish. I could probably speak it every day with someone. And there's newspapers and television stations in Spanish that I could also use to learn it. But German has the beer drinking songs, and that's where my heart was even before I liked beer! :)

I would definitely find people that you can speak German with if you want to learn it. There's bound to be a German club or group in your area. They should be able to help with learning German. German has dialects like American English has them. Maybe try Der Spiegel, or's that Das Spiegel? Die? See, the the messes me up. Anyways, it's a big magazine or newspaper in Germany. They might have an English edition and you can compare the articles in them side by side.