farmgineer

When/where I was in school, that wouldn't have counted. They counted only words >= 3 letters and excluded 'the'.

Especially as someone paid in a currency weaker than the dollar with a lower salary than I'd have in the US, I can't even afford to do this if I wanted to. I do still subscribe to Nebula which has many creators I like

I grew up with F, but now I'm all for C. It drives me crazy that the US (where I grew up) refuses to change.

I suppose it depends upon said genie's views on prescriptivism, heh.

At least in English, commas aren't magic sentence separators; you might wish to look into the semicolon for joining independent clauses.

That's fine. Google devices have been disappearing from my life as well, so this will not be a long-term problem.

I do, personally, because that's like basic manners.

I'm with you. I've heard that phrase twice today already and would never think "oh, that's a reference to something".

It sounds unnatural to me as a native speaker, but I don't know that it's "wrong". Even the Germanic languages as a family don't consistently have the same order for words like that, which is neat.

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.

Then you end up with less flexibility and more fixed word order. English used to have cases though they've almost entirely collapsed at this point. German is fine as it is. Learn some grammar and it will become second nature.

Most (if not all) Slavic-family languages do not. Neither do Japanese nor Korean. Some languages have a partial system (i.e. no a/an but the to show definiteness). Some languages have both but do it differently (Scandanavian languages suffix the definite article on nouns, but the indefinite precedes the noun like in English). Languages are messy and neat.