German: How to learn German, by Thomas, native German tutor at Telios Tutors
If you take a closer look to written German, you will quickly find out that many words seem familiar. This is because both languages have a common origin, yet German and English are descendants from Proto-Germanic, which was spoken for thousands of years as one tongue. This shared history and culture can benefit you while learning German.
Things that seem difficult in German (cases, gender or sentence structure), existed in English once too. Do you remember reading Shakespeare back in school? – The strange grammar and sentence structure seemed sometimes as if Shakespeare was messing up words (we will come back to that later).
Luckily for English speakers, a lot of these old grammatical rules got lost during the last few centuries. Unlucky for those who try to learn German, many of these rules still exist, but that should not frighten you. These two languages are closer in similarity than you may initially think.
To begin learning German as a native English speaker, let’s briefly compare the two languages.
Similarities and differences
English and German both belong to the Indo-European language family and therefore they are linguistic siblings. That is why native English speakers have an advantage over most others learning German, as the basics of the two languages are closely related. Both languages share the same alphabetic system which is based on Latin letters and they have many cognates. For this reason, old and frequently used words, which have hardly undergone a change in language development, are similarly pronounced: Father – Vater, Mother – Mutter, Apple – Apfel and so on.
When the English language was going through a change from Middle English to Modern English, many old Germanic structures disappeared. Do you remember Shakespeare? Here are two lines of his first sonnet:
Pity the world, or else this glutton be, to eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.
At Shakespeare’s time, the word order was freer than it is today. Verbs, nouns or adjectives could be moved around to stress their importance, exactly like German. Today’s English follows a strict subject-verb-object order (Who-did what-with whom?). In English, we say: “I gave some grass over the fence to the sheep.” In German speaker might say: “Some grass gave I to the sheep over the fence.” (Ein bisschen Gras gab ich dem Schaf über den Zaun.) The rule is, that the finite verb comes a second position (marked underlined).
German does not follow such a strict word order because the four cases define which items are direct objects. The German listener knows because of the cases, who gave what to whom. The inflected articles provide this information (marked in italics). As word order is crucial in English, German word order (and vice versa) can not be directly translated. But no worries: In case of misunderstandings one can ask.
Genders in German
Grammatical gender is not important in English, because most nouns in English have lost their gender during the development of the language. The gender of a German noun is often indicated by an article. They are either masculine, feminine, or neuter.
For example:
der Mann (the man)
die Frau (the woman)
das Kind (the child)
The advantage of these genders is that it is always clearly defined from whom one speaks. For example, if you say “My friend is a doctor”, it is not clear whether the friend is male or female (the same with the doctor). This may lead to some confusion. In German, this is characterised by gender-specific forms: “Meine Freundin (f.) ist Ärztin(f.)” or “Mein Freund (m.) ist Arzt (m.)”.
You can learn this by studying grammar, which may rather tedious. It is better to learn this in contact with native speakers.
How to be successful in learning German as a beginner
When starting to learn German, most students concentrate on learning vocabulary and grammar, the usual basics. Unfortunately, they often stick too long to these elements, get bored or confused and this is often the end of the language course!
What about another, less traditional approach: Vera F. Birkenbihl, a German developer of a language learning method named after herself, recommends these four steps (Birkenbihl, Vera F.: Sprachenlernen leichtgemacht! Die Birkenbihl-Methode Fremdsprachen zu lernen. Munich: mvg Verlag 2010).
Follow these 4 steps to help you fast track learning German
- Decode: Translate a text word by word and read it aloud many times (perhaps a native speaker can help you with the translation). Trust your brain! It has already learned your mother tongue without a grammar book, so it should be able to make the right combinations.
- Listen actively: Make a recording of a native speaker reading your text. Listen to this recording many times while you read the text quietly. This will help you quickly familiarise yourself with the sound of the language and the speaking speed.
- Listen passively: Listen to the recording of your text played in the background while you are doing everyday activities.
- Take a “language bath”: Surround yourself with the language and immerse yourself in it. Listen to the language on TV, radio or audio book. At this step, it does not matter if you understand everything. Your subconscious mind accustoms itself to speaking speed, to intonation and you learn new vocabulary at the same time. Here are is a practical guide on how you can improve your memory.
No matter how you learn German, explore the language by using it in some way, either by speaking to someone or in writing.
Would you like to learn German as a beginner with one of our German tutors? Or perhaps you would like to improve your existing knowledge on the language? Contact Us today to arrange a lesson private German tutor at Telios Tutors.