Most people find it a big relief that while German is not considered to be an easy language to learn, at least the spelling is very straight forward. Every letter is spelled the way it is pronounced - no idiosyncrasies like the words "tough" or "laugh" in English.

However, there is that funny thing of using upper case a lot. But even that's straightforward: all nouns, names etc start using upper case, whereas all verbs, adjectives, articles are lower case. Including - and here's the caveat - names of countries used as an adjective! For example, in English you would write "an American woman" in German that would look like: "eine amerikanische Frau" - "an English man" is "ein englischer Mann" - "a German child" is "ein deutsches Kind" ... all adjectives are lower case, countries or not, get a load of that!!