Coming back to English helping you in learning German, lets talk about some aspects of the English language itself in this regard.
Similarities are endless: English and German are both descendants of Latin language sharing the same pool of word roots and the same script. If you already have knowledge of the English language and the script, already on day one of German learning, you can read a German surprisingly well and might even understand a decent chunk of it. (The same way I can read and understand a lot of Dutch now; it has many similarities with German and its name ‘Dutch’ has the same word root as ‘Deutsch’!)
Take this German sentence for example – Sie ist nett. It’s the same as English ‘She is nice’. Or if someone asks you ‘Bist du Single?’, it’s not too hard to understand that they are asking if you are single. Not only do English and German share roots for thousands of words, due to the ubiquity of the English language in modern times, German has also adopted a number of English words as is. ‘Single’ is just one example (the true German word for it is ‘ledig’ by the way). Most of the times though, such borrowed words are ‘Germanized’, such as ‘gegooglet’ – third form (perfect tense) of the verb ‘to google’, or ‘gecancelt’ – third form of ‘to cancel’. Another amusing example is the German word K.O. which is a short form of ‘Knock Out’ and is used for knockout in a boxing game or in a sports tournament. But no German speaker would simply use the word ‘knockout’, they would just say K.O. (pronounced kah-oh).
A word of caution here. Don’t think that every word that seems like English word has the same meaning. Some such words are called “false friends” and I talk about them separately. Also, sometimes, Germans have also “invented” some English words, i.e. some words in the German language are pure English originally but have come to mean something specific for the Germans and are used that way only in German-speaking areas. For example – the very German word ‘Blinker’ comes from the English word ‘blink’ and means the indicator on a car. ‘Beamer’ comes from ‘beam’ (of light) and means a projector.
In addition to the word roots, spellings and meaning, English and German, both being western European languages, share a lot of cultural background and history. So, if you have learnt about Christianity through the English language, you won’t have to learn about it again when learning German. (Though, you might learn the deeper nuances of it, like Evangelism, Protestantism, Lutheran church etc; And there are some differences in Christmas traditions in Germany and some English-speaking countries, for example – in Germany Santa Claus and Saint Nicholas are two different people and are pictured and celebrated in two different ways). The same goes for ancient Greek and Roman historical elements in the English or German languages. They are the same. So, the knowledge of the English language and the European culture will help you quite a bit in learning German. On top of that, German has some elements that are surprisingly simple. And that brings me to the my second point –
German has lots of “simple” elements
A disclaimer first up. ‘Simple’ is a relative term. Things that someone else might find simple, may be quite complicated for you, or vice versa. Also, the simple things start to seem simple only after you have gain some ground in your language battle because that’s when you start to notice the patterns, the connections. In the beginning, everything seems new, unconnected, and difficult. So, when I say ‘simple’ elements in German, I mean the things that I found relatively simple after having spent some years with the language. Let’s see what they are.
1. Fixed rules for Pronunciation
Compared to many other Latin-based languages, French or English for example, German is a godsend when it comes to pronunciation. In German, you pronounce what you see. For example – the German word ‘Knie’ (same meaning as English ‘knee’) is pronounced with the ‘K’.
Apart from that, there are fixed rules for pronouncing vowels, group of vowels and consonants. So, the German word ‘Name’ (same meaning as English ‘name’) is pronounced naah-muh because ‘a’ is alsways pronounced as long sound ‘aah’ and ‘e’ as short sound ‘uh’.
The rule about ‘s’ is that it is generally pronounced as ‘z’, as ‘sh’ when followed by ‘p’ or ‘t’ (as in Spain or Stalin) and as ‘s’ when it comes at the end of a word. That’s why the German word for six, ‘Sechs’ is not pronounces as ‘sex’ but as ‘zex’ and ‘Stein’ (English equivalent of ‘stone’) as shtaa.in but ‘Glas’ is pronounced the same way as its English counterpart ‘glass’.
Unlike English, ‘c’ is pronounced as ‘s’, actually more like ‘ts’ and never as ‘k’.
Even when German rules of pronunciation deviate, they deviate with a fixed rule. For example – words borrowed from foreign languages are pronounced in the foreign way. In ‘Curry’, ‘c’ can be pronounced as ‘k’. Words borrowed from French are pronounced the French way, for example – ‘Engagement’, ‘Rendezvous’, ‘Mousse au Chocolat’ etc. But an exception to this exception is that borrowed words from English are pronounced the German way (this may be because English is a descendent of German and doesn’t take precedence over German pronunciation but French is of a parallel language branch). So, ‘International’ is pronounced as in.ter.naa.tsyo.naal.
There is one downside of German fixed rules of pronunciation though. Most Germans say my name wrongly (even after having spent years working with me). They pronounce ‘Praa.khee’ because the ‘ch’ in ‘Prachi’ will be pronounced as ‘kh’ in German and not as ‘ch’ (as in English word ‘chat’). You win some, you lose some!
2. Fixed rules for spelling
Hand-in-hand with the German fixed pronunciation goes German spelling. You write what you hear. While in English you might write the sound ‘k’ as a ‘c’ is ‘Copy’, as ‘ch’ in ‘Chlorine’, and as ‘k’ in ‘Kite’, in German you will write a ‘k’ sound with ‘k’ as ‘Kopie’ (the equivalent of ‘Copy’). ‘Kopie’ also discards ‘y’ because of the long ‘ee’ sound is always written as ‘ie’ in German. Incidentally, ‘Y’ actually has an interesting role in German. It is only a vowel and not a consonant. So, the consonant sound of ‘y’ (as in English word ‘Yacht’) is represented in German by ‘j’, like ‘jetzt’ (German word for ‘now’). And the ‘j’ sound (as in English ‘jug’) is represented in German by an intimidating looking consonant cluster ‘dsch’. So, ‘Jungle’ is written as ‘Dschungel’ (see how ‘e’ doesn’t come at the end in German because otherwise the pronunciation won’t end on ‘l’ but on ‘e’). By the way, maybe it’s because of this reduced usage of the letter ‘y’ and because of much more frequent use of ‘z’ that German computer keyboards differ in one important way from English keyboards – ‘y’ and ‘z’ have switched places. (Other differences in German keyboard are the provision for the German letters ö, ü, ä, and ß; they are roughly equivalent to ‘oe’, ‘ue’, ‘ae’ and ‘ss’ respectively).
See, German spellings might seem complicated at first but they are strict rule-followers (just like the German people). Once you get the hang of those rules, you would crack the code (Just like the British cryptographers in WWII did with German Enigma machine)! But again, the quite strict ‘spell as your hear’ rule screws up my name. They tend to write it as ‘Pratschi’ with another one of those German consonant clusters – tsch, or at best as ‘Pratchi’. sigh Oh well!
(Continued in the next part)