Which language is more similar to English: French or German?

Answer 1

It is true that French ran right over English after the Norman conquest of England in 1066. (The Normans were Danes who settled in northern France and adopted the French language).

In spite of this, however, English is still fundamentally a Teutonic (or Germanic) language whose nearest relatives are Frisian, Low German and Dutch. After that, High German and Yiddish are its closest relatives. More distant relatives are, of course, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic and the extinct Gothic (once spoken across much of Europe from southern Sweden to the Crimea, from Romania to Greece and from northern Italy to Spain).

The French loan words in English can be compared to the Chinese loanwords in Korean and Japanese. Although Chinese loanwords are numerous in both languages, Korean and Japanese are still separate languages which belong to the Ural-Altaic family of languages rather than the Sino-Tibetan family of languages like Chinese.

You could also compare the French influence on English to the Slavic influence on Yiddish and Romanian (which are still not Slavic languages) or the Arabic influence on Persian (Farsi) which is still not Arabic. In fact, they always say "Never confuse an Iranian (Persian) with an Arab if you meet one."

Answer 2

German and English are both Germanics; French is a Romance language, to shut those who say it's French. Because I knew English, I got fluent in German in about a year of living there. Then again, French is not that far, either. Try Hungarian to see exactly what "different" really means.

Answer 3

Both German and English belong to the same family of Germanic Languages, whereas French belongs to the Romance Language family. There are more words of German origin in English than of French origin.

Answer 4

GERMAN. In fact, Old English was a Germanic language. Middle English and Modern English added many more influences, -eventhough the Middle-English influence was primarily Norman- the similarity of Modern-English to German is Much greater than to French.

(French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese are Latin based languages)
(Old English, and Dutch are Germanic languages)
- Modern English is its own thing, but the early German influence is very evident, if you are a student of languages --

Answer 5

German, the similarities to the English language are remarkable. Many people are able to understand a lot of German because the languages are so closely related.

Answer 6

German, I'm from Germany. I can't speak French but I think German is more similar to English.

Answer 7

I'd say German. Although we use a lot of French words in English, there are also German words that are very similiar to English words (our German class sometimes just adds an "en" to the end of a word if we don't know the German word for something :D Surprisingly often it is a real word, e.g. "stoppen" is the German word for stop). French is completely different grammar-wise though. German isn't as hard to learn because it is more similiar to English, the sentence structure isn't as complicated as French.

French pronouciation is very different to English whereas German is quite similiar apart from a couple of easy to remember differences (j's are pronouced like y's etc.).

Answer 8

German

Answer 9

English is derived from the Germanic language.If you follow it back in time you will find that it comes from a middle English which came from the Anglo-Saxon which branched off of the west Germanic language that was derived from the Germanic language.
French however is a romantic language branching off of an Italic Latin.

Answer 10

I found German was easier to comprehend. And I live in Canada, therefore I was forced to take French in elementary school. I only took one German class in university and I found that the sentence structures and they way you pronounce words and letters was a lot more similar to English than French structure and pronunciation.