Is English your first language? Your first language usually connects more with your emotions than any other language. Even simple words like love feel different when spoken in different languages. As a native German speaker, I don’t think that German is less emotive or emotional than English.
Also, there probably is stuff you’d enjoy reading (that is less old ;)), but it’s hard to be aware of literature if there is not really a target audience for it in the country you are living in. I.e. even just walking around in my city, I walk past multiple book shops - all selling German books. Even if I don’t actively look for them, I am sort of aware of them or I can just go into any bookshop and be like “This is what I like. Please recommend me something.” or just spend some time in the library. It’s out there, it’s just more effort to find it.
Now that I think about it, I wouldn’t even say I think that German is less emotive in general, but that I did feel it in the example I gave. It’s definitely a stereotype that I think is keeping people from reading though! (to answer your question : no, I learned English much later than I learned German But right now my English is definitely stronger.)
And I’ve been following book reviewers from German (and other german speaking countries) readers to get some recs and did find them, I’m not suggesting there is nothing for me in the whole language. But it’s harder to find than english for sure. Especially because I’m already picky
Responding to this and @Biblio - wow I did not mean to derail this thread with OT musings about German
German language media
I have also spent a lot of time thinking about this topic myself because German is for all intents and purposes the foreign language I feel the most comfortable and expressive in (even more so than Japanese). I dedicated a not insignificant portion of my time and life to learning it, even though I never had much interest or passion for it. I always hoped that the more advanced I became, I would find some content I really loved. However, that never really ended up happening for me. Don’t get me wrong, I 1) haven’t read so many German books in general and 2) do have some German authors that I do love, but it’s not really to the extent it is with Japanese and Korean where I feel like “wow I want to consume this content every day for the rest of my life”. Being able to read those good books sometimes just feels like a very nice bonus that took an insane amount of time to achieve. But like Biblio said, German bookstores are just full of books published originally in German. Maybe there is someone out there enjoying German philosophy or krimis as much as I enjoy Japanese books, so the universe is perhaps in balance. I do think that some countries media output has more universal appeal though, and I’m not quite sure why.
Anyways, that’s not to say that any cultural output from the German speaking region is boring to me. I just don’t find what I love at the bookstore or on Spotify, for example. I enjoy rather things like memes or internet culture in German instead!
Do we need a thread about people begrudgingly learning languages due to life circumstances?
Definitely tag me if you decide to go forward with this idea or need help organizing. I could definitely use the external push to get me back into reading in Dutch - even though I use it daily at work, I’ve noticed my vocabulary isn’t getting that much better and I could do with some investment here.
Maybe not for Japanese, but some of the courses are really good. I did Duolingo French for a year, about 15 minutes a day, and at that time my French overtook my Japanese. We went on holiday, our car broke down, and we were able to communicate with a mechanic who spoke no English (car successfully fixed!), gave people directions (for some reason French tourists kept asking us for directions, can you look like someone who knows where they are going? lmao), talked to an artist in a market for half an hour, and had no problems with meals and shops.
It counted as a huge success for me!
But yeah, I agree, the JP course just doesn’t work very effectively, at least not the last time I looked.
It now occurs to me that all these polls would look better as pie charts. Oh well, too late now. Let’s try a simple one as a pie chart to see how it goes:
Sorry about that I actually got confused myself as I was making the choices.
That’s awesome! To add to your good experience, one person in my close family has only studied Spanish through Duolingo, and went on to successfully read novels in Spanish after that. Besides some languages being better curated than others, I think it also helps a lot if the learner has prior experience with language learning (my relative already speaks several other languages), and even more so if the languages the learner already knows are closely related to the target language. Far fewer hurdles to jump over.
That’s so true and a great point! I definitely knew the ropes of learning a language close to my own. And I had previous experience with Spanish (4 yrs in high school), and more than a decade prior had done a semester in French, so maybe some of that had stuck (although none was active anymore!)
that’s awesome and so inspiring! I really should read in French to solidify those gains…
*Readys um actually stance*
It’s best practice to use pie charts for at most three categories, and ideally only two categories. Otherwise the human brain isn’t as good as picking out small differences in wedges of a circle as it is the differences in sizes in bars in a chart. So the way you did it is actually prefect
Also, til you can change the visualization on a poll…
Hmm, if they’re the same Natively level shouldn’t they be the same difficulty? I find manga easier than novels in general, but then they’re correspondingly lower in level…
Most people find manga easier than novels, but I’m one of the few that are more comfortable with novels, hence the question. Objectively they should be the same difficulty, yes, but I find that more textual context helps me more than images do.
But like Biblio said, German bookstores are just full of books published originally in German. Maybe there is someone out there enjoying German philosophy or krimis as much as I enjoy Japanese books, so the universe is perhaps in balance. I do think that some countries media output has more universal appeal though, and I’m not quite sure why. 
