Ah the innocent naivety of a beginner speaker. You start off in A1 thinking „oh this isn’t so bad“ and then reality hits. Diplomats rate German as harder to learn for native English speakers than any of the Romance languages.

Schafenfreude

Seconded, context clues and a lot of what Tom Scott refers to as the rules of conversation make memes in general a lot less difficult to interpret than a standard conversation.

I like to think of German more like Spanish because of all the irregular verbs.