how easy is german to learn and is it similar to english?

Question

if there are any german people here prepared to help me learn please let me know

Answer 1

As a German language teacher I firmly believe that German is in no way more difficult to learn than French. People always say that there are so many words that french and English have in common. Well - did you realize that out of the 100 most commonly used words in English 96 are Germanic??? Just to give you a quick example:

house - Haus
me - mich
hand - hand
foot - fuß (pronounce /foos/)
man - Mann
etc. etc. etc.

In terms of grammar German is more difficult than ENGLISH but by no means more difficult than French!

You should look at the website of the German cultural institute, the Goethe Institut. They have an English website on which they offer various online audio and reading materials. As far as I know they are for free.
http://www.goethe.de/dll/enindex.htm...
Also, you could try Deutsche Welle Radio which is the international German language broadcasting service, available all over the world. They also have language learning materials.
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/0,2142,2547,00...

People often say that it is difficult to pronounce German. I strongly disagree. German is one of the easiest languages in terms of transferring written words into spoken languages. Contrary to English the sounds in German alway sound the same. An A is an /a/, no matter what. So you can theoretically pronounce all German words from day 1 - except maybe for those sounds that you haven't got from your own native language. (R and CH are typical examples). However, with the audio material so widely available on the net you should be able to master that.

Good luck and happy learning...

Answer 2

I think German was easier to learn than French, as they have the same base language, both English and German are derived from Latin - with German you can often work out words as they are very similar to the English. Also the German language is more literal than the French and Spanish languages so words are made up from other words instead of inventing a new one - as this doesn't read very clearly I'll do an example! Hovercraft = Luft(air) kissen (kissing) boot (boat) - see it makes sense!

It is also much easier to use tenses in German than in French - and the verb structure is more uniform, I really enjoyed German.

If you want to learn German then there are two ways I would recommend - Deutsche Heute (German Today) textbook and cassette or (even better) is the Open University Level 1 course, this will give you an excellent grounding in German (equivalent to a GCSE but a lot more accessible - you can even do an online version now) You can then progress this to a Certificate Level, or all the way to degree level.

Viele gluck (good luck!)

Answer 3

Hiya,

In my opinion the best way to learn German is to be with people who speak German properly. In this case it means that moving out to countries where German is spoken may be very helpful. But if you can't do this, go to the Language School :)

German is not a difficult language at all. It's been 2 years I've been learning it and I really enjoy doing that. It's a bit similar to English. If you know English then it will be much easier for you to learn different languages. I wish you good luck! Cheers

Answer 4

Hi mate! Being a native speaker of German, teaching German & English as foreign languages in Poland, I'm sure German is a whole lot harder to learn than English, even though these languages do, indeed, have the same roots. The sentence structure in German is quite different, there are these dreadful articles, like, any noun can have any article ("der / die / das", much like in English before the year 1066 AD). Some "core words" may be somewhat similar, but we're talking about entirely different languages here, anyway! Should you have more questions, please feel free to contact me at '[e-mail]'.
Have a nice day!

Answer 5

If you have an understanding of another European language, then you should find it easy to understand. I moved to Germany 3 years ago and didn't speak any German. I found it very difficult to learn at first because the sentence structure is different from ours and also the verbs need to be conjugated depending on the subject you are talking about, so you can have several different ways of talking about the same thing. Which is confusing at first. I picked most of my German up from watching TV, listening to the radio and also being around German people. Which can be difficult because all Germans can speak English.

Answer 6

Hey, I'm German!
I suppose it's actually quite hard. The grammar is much more complicated- there are so many words for "the", eg. der, die, das, den, dem, des, ...
It all depends on the kind of word AND the meaning of the sentence. So for an English or American person this is probably difficult to understand.

But you should learn in anyway- it's such a cool language once you've learned to speak it properly! Good luck!

Answer 7

It is quite easy to speak, but to write "Grammatically correct" is a lot harder. eg in English we have words that end in "ough" which can be pronounced differently. Cough, Dough, Rough etc but in German all words with a similar spelling are pronounced the same. 1 difficulty in German is the nouns, because they like the French have masc. fem and neuter so the best way is to learn the form with the object.. verbs go at the end of a sentence. eg we would say "It will be fine" the Germans would say " it will fine be".. Good luck

Answer 8

No reason why you can't do it.

For a native English speaker, the effort required to learn Spanish is a 1. To learn German is 3. Therefore, for every hour you might spend mastering Spanish, it would take three to get the same proficiency in German.

But, it could be worse; it could be Arabic, Japanese or Chinese: all of them 5-6 for an English speaker!

Answer 9

I'm a native speaker and I think the grammar is a bit more complex than that of English or French... and you have to memorize the articles right along with the nouns. That helps a lot in getting some of the grammar right.
The hardest part will be the proper pronounciation, esp. if your native language is English, but with practice, you can master that too.
I worked part time doing legal translations while in college. If you need help with anything, mail me at [e-mail]

Answer 10

German is quite difficult to learn compared to French, spanish or italian... It's not similar to english but in fact very different...