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When learning German fo Anglo’s | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Vinlander Groupie Canada Joined 5821 days ago 62 posts - 69 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 1 of 6 30 May 2009 at 5:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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I know German is a Germanic language and so is English. I know the major difference between them is the case and gender system so lets leave this out of the discussion. But is a Anglo learning German the same as a Spaniard learning French, or a Russian learning Slovak. Or is it entirely different. For me I know it's as a known fact but I sure as hell would never guess if someone didn't tell me. The only thing that makes me feeling the similiarity is the rythms. I mean people seem to move the same way when talking the languages, and when it's sang I often confuse the two(part of it I guess is that they both use simple common words in songs, like (you, when, way, and so on. Edited by Vinlander on 01 June 2009 at 6:11pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5766 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 2 of 6 30 May 2009 at 5:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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... eh?
EDIT: I think I finally understand. I was puzzled at first when I heard that people here rate French as being easier to learn than German because for native German speakers English is a lot easier to learn than French. As in terms of vocablary discount, Spanish and French are easier to learn for native English speakers. It is not that German and English do not share a great deal of words with common roots, but those will only become transparent in later stages of one's learning process when you understand whole word families and learn rarer words. For example, English bone has the German counterpart Bein. However throughout the last centuries, Bein assumed the meaning of leg and lost the meaning of bone in contexts other than a small number of set phrases and poetic language. As for grammar - for us Germans French grammar feels alien at first, whereas English grammar comes across as similar to German, just reduced. Maybe for English speakers both French and German grammar feels alien? Edited by Bao on 31 May 2009 at 6:02pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Achmann Diglot Newbie Australia Joined 5656 days ago 17 posts - 17 votes Speaks: English*, German | Message 3 of 6 31 May 2009 at 3:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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They both come under the same branch but English from my knowledge really is a break away. We also stole a lot of french words. But I am a bit lost on what your asking. So I will finish on that note of not contributing much.
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| Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 6034 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes 5 sounds | Message 4 of 6 31 May 2009 at 4:28pm | IP Logged | ||
Ouch. You didn't close your bracket and people have trouble parsing your post :p. German is further away from English than Spanish is from French. In fact French is probably the language you can learn with the greatest discount. Perhaps Dutch too... In German you get only a couple of short words for free. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kflavin Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5943 days ago 24 posts - 31 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: French | Message 5 of 6 31 May 2009 at 11:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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German grammar is somewhat similar to English but unfortunately it favors German speakers learning English more than English speakers learning German. You can usually see a similar concept but there's generally a lot more you need to know for German.
Strong verbs are similar in both languages but learning German you'll have to learn a bit more concerning umlaut and whether it takes sein or haben in the perfect tense. This is usually the same as in antiquated English but that doesn't help you much as a modern English speaker. German speakers on the other hand only have to learn that the perfect in English always uses to have and they're almost done. A lot of the prepositions have corresponding English ones (in -in, vor - fore, bei - by, aus - out, zu - to) but learning German you then have to learn which case(s) the objects of the prepositions are in. Once again a German speaker learns the preposition and he only has to focus on how they are used idiomatically. Many of the basic nouns are similar Fisch, Butter, Brot - Fish, Bread, Butter but then you'll have to learn that Fisch is masculine, Butter feminine, and Brot neuter and what all of their plurals are. For a German speaker you learn the word and you know the article is always going to be the and the plural will almost always just be (e)s. All in all, it will be a help knowing English when you're trying to learn German. There's not a lot that's horribly foreign about the grammar but it's safe to say there are no corresponding concepts in English and German where the English is not vastly simpler. Now, when you consider things like aspect (i.e. the progressive, do as a helping verb, or the difference between the perfect and imperfect) where there is nothing similar in German that's where they tend to run into problems. Now with French, you get so much more passive vocabulary by knowing English that you'll probably be reading it fluently much more quickly than you would with German but at the same time it will probably take you longer to even get the basics of things like the subjunctive and conditional than you would in German. For example if I tell you to use the word würde the same way you use would in English you probably know about 75% of everything you need to know to use the subjunctive in everyday spoken German and even the other 25% is fairly simple if you consider wäre is basically the same as the English were and hätte the same as had. Sorry, if this post was a bit long but like a lot of people on this forum when I get going about a language it's very hard to stop me. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6272 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 6 of 6 07 June 2009 at 12:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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English is so heavily loaded with Latin/Romance vocabulary that it is an aberration among the Germanic languages. Some linguists even call English semi-Romance, a label sometimes also applied to Albanian which also has a large number of Latin-Romance words.
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