“Never knew before what eternity was made for. It is to give some of us a chance to learn German.” – Mark Twain
I guess this statement of Twain was for good reason? Yet I stand to differ and here is why:
German Closely Relates to English
In one of my previous posts I mentioned that English and German both stems from West Germanic.
This means that German and English must at least have some resemblance? Although other languages like Greek, Latin, and French influenced English greatly, when looking at the basics; English and German are brothers.
About 60% of the German Vocabulary is also part of English. In some cases the spelling differ, but you will, without a doubt, recognize some of these. In other words, you already know some of the words you have to learn.
German adopted English
The world has changed quite a bit until now and all languages are influenced by the one or other language. Some of their words are used etc…
German has “stolen” a few words form English, so besides for the fact that the two languages stems from the same roots, German has taken some of the English vocabulary as its own. Some examples include cool, band and computer. The list goes on.
Phonetic Spelling
Now you might be saying: “Pho what, what?”
In simple terms this means that German is pronounced in the same way as it is spelled, so if you know how to pronounce each sound you will easily grasp the rest.
The Future Tense is Rarely used
In spoken German people rarely uses the future tense. They simply say it in the present tense. For example:
Wir helfen dir um 12 Uhr. (We will help you at 12 O’Clock.)
The future tense is used in written German, but nonetheless, you won’t have to form it all the time.
All nous are Capitalized
Unlike English not only proper nouns are capitalized. ALL nouns are. (You can find out why here) This helps us to recognize the nouns which improves things like readability.
I’m talking way too much, so I’m going to say good bye for now.
Have fun learning German!
xoxo,
Charlé
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