memes

The point of languages it to be simple and efficient, and they should evolve to that goal eventually.

That's one hell of an assumption to bring to the table. There is no point to language, no end goal towards which they must, or even should evolve. They're a natural creation of humans to facilitate communication, but coming from human beings, they're naturally quite irregular and odd, at times.

I mean, I get it that German isn't a cakewalk to pick up, but you're also complaining about the unreasonable complexity in one of the less morphologically complex European languages. Take a gander at Polish, Icelandic, Basque, or Finnish, and German will probably seem quite charming and quaint with its handful of cases and corresponding forms of the articles.

My native language isn’t English in case you were assuming that.

I wasn't assuming that, don't worry. That's why I phrased my message like that.

I guess I agree to disagree here. Language is an expression of culture and heritage too. I would never speak German differently now just because of a reform. Neither would 99% of German speakers I assume. Yet we freely integrate English words into our language because it feels natural. These English words often come and go anyway so I'm not actually concerned the German language will become deluded from Internet lingo or anything.

Even Japanese, which I touched for a few years wasn’t nearly as bad.

I think this is a 'to each his own' sort of situation. I like the idea of kanji but am terrible at memorizing them. I'll take German grammar over kanji any day. If you specifically mean grammar, Japanese does have its own challenges as well.

The point of languages it to be simple and efficient

According to whom? The point of language is to communicate information. There are high-context and low-context ways to do this. There are direct and indirect ways to do this, all of which encode certain cultural meaning. If you studied Japanese, think about all the indirectness, honorifics, etc. that aren't there to be simple, they're there for cultural and societal reasons, even if mostly just historical in some cases.

I don't know about Latin letters more generally, but at least the issue with the default Latin alphabet, there just aren't enough letters to represent the sounds used in English phonetically. The English language has between 14-25 vowels, depending on dialect and accent, and a further 24 consonants. When the Latin alphabet only has 26 letters, you're naturally going to run into situations where one letter has to represent multiple sounds. With that said, I don't see any reason, aside from the sheer cultural inertia of hundreds of years not doing so, why English couldn't address the issue with diacritics on different letters to achieve the necessary number of unique letters to represent all of the sounds found in English.

It's that way because languages grow naturally and are part of a culture. Although if you have breakfast with people from different parts of Germany or even just different households, you may find yourself arguing about the nouns of a popular nougat cream brand. It's quite controversial for some reason.

Whatever the case, the same can't be said about spelling, however. Writing is often reformed in many languages many times and it generally works. A language changes the way we think as much as the way we think shapes how we speak. You can't really reform how people speak from the top. It either happens or it doesn't.