learning german vs learning swedish

at some point, my swedish outpaced my german, and i've been thinking about why, while also deciding to put actual effort into my german as well. i technically lived there for a bit over a year, but with traveling factored in, spent a total of about 8 actual months there. regardless, i didn't get as good at german as i would have liked too. i took a month-long intensive course when i first arrived, then didn't really put in active effort after that. i still improved, and by the end i could keep up enough to not need translation while backstage learning choreography for a fashion show. but i never formally learned anything beyond present tense and trennbare verbs. we briefly started past tense but then the class ended before i learned to produce it myself. i absorbed lots and lots of disparate vocabulary, especially church-related jargon, since we went to mass in german every sunday. so it's not like i accomplished nothing. but i'm a language-learning fiend and that wasn't enough for me. 

anyhow, where was i? oh. i find swedish way easier than german. hmm. i forget what i initially wanted to say on that front. oh! 

one reason i find swedish easier than german is that it seems like in many cases, swedish uses the same words in multiple contexts, whereas german (like english, i think), has entirely different words for different situations. let me give an example. in german, words you hear in church are completely different words than you'd hear in everyday life. but in swedish, it felt like i could understand so much more in church much more quickly, because rather than use church-specific jargon, the words were just everyday words. same with like, safety demonstrations on an aircraft. see? aircraft. that's a totally different word. idk, maybe swedish is like that too, i'm still a relative beginner. but it certainly feels like swedish is a lot simpler in terms of words used. 

also compared to german, i feel like you can get much farther in swedish with just a dictionary, whereas german has more grammatical structures that need to be formally learned before you understand them. trennbare verbs are actually a good example. i don't remember exactly, but my impression of them is they're verbs with prefixes, and the prefix gets split from the root of the word and placed at the end of the sentence. so before knowing what they were, i'd be like, "uhhhh why is there a random an or zu at the end of a word?" if you looked that prefix up in the dictionary, it wouldn't tell you the crucial information that it actually belongs to the verb in the other part of the sentence and needs to be connected to it in your mind in order to make any sense. 

and again, maybe swedish has stuff like this too, but this is just my impression. it's nice to be able to discuss my impression of things without first researching every part of it to make sure i'm right. who cares? i write what i think now and then later when i get more information i can write what i think again. maybe that'll be closer to some sort of truth. or maybe it won't, or maybe i'll never write again. who cares? i want to write what i think, so i'm going to write what i think.