Articles

Many language students from English speaking countries want to learn German but when asked tell us it is extremely complicated when they are faced with the obstacles of the complex German grammar and the complicated vocabulary. The German language may be not an easy language to learn but it definitely is a very fascinating one. If you are a native English speaker you might find many similarities and find many clues that both the German and English language actually belong to the same family.

English students are usually surprised to find that actually German is the language most similar to English - more than any other language. This is due to the fact that English and German both belong to the same family of languages: The Germanic Languages. In Europe three language families dominate: Germanic, Romanic and Slavic.

We can find that in Northern Germany - located closer to England than the southern part - the dialect versions of certain words become quite similar to English.

This may be one of the reasons why there are many sites written in English doing a fantastic job teaching German. They can use examples from English that people can easily understand and then use them to better understand the respective German version of the expression.

A fact that makes it hard for some people to learn German is that many tutorials are too abstract and boring. This is why students of the German Language prefer to turn to online tutorials to start learning the language.

There are many tutorials out there that provide illustrated examples or audio tutorials. The disadvantage of text books is always that they are exactly what their name suggests: Books with text. However, to learn a language we want to hear and speak the language. This is why any type of multimedia tutorial is perfect for beginners.

If you want to find a German language lesson you can easily find some examples on the Internet. However, most free lessons turn out to be just a trial version or the first chapter of a paid program or an expensive product.

In case you just want complete free German tutorials - check out this list of free German tutorials.

Although it is a good advice to use music for learning English - do not use music and song lyrics to learn German. Many songs contain either a form of dialect, inappropriate slang or rude language. Too many songs play with language by falsifying it and twisting it around. Some use very old-fashioned and poetry-style language. So don't use it.

Do not read German newspapers. Most of them are very political and use a a type of language which is extremely hard to understand. The sentences are extremely long, so usually when you get to the end you cannot remember how it started. Newspapers are clearly for the advanced language learner. So please stay away from them in the beginning.