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How to Learn German

There are so many books that offer German language courses containing grammar rule explanations, vocabulary exercises, reading comprehension texts, pair work tasks and many other useful materials. The last thing we want to do is to bore you by repeating all this information here on this Article. The purpose of our articles is this: In most of the German books some facts are missing that we consider vital for you to know if you want to master the German language or any other other language.

The biggest drawback of any language course book is that as soon as you open it the language becomes the purpose. What does that mean? The book gives you explanations and definitions but the truth is that you don’t need this information when you want to communicate with another person.
As a matter of fact, all the grammar rules are likely to hinder you in your efforts to communicate. You don’t believe us? Well, let us ask you a question: Did you learn German at school? (Oh, yes if you did learn it you will say: «Ah, that was long ago and the teacher was bad and the class was large and I didn’t know why I should learn the language anyway.»)

Whatever your excuse might be – it’s a fact that you «learned» German at school and maybe later in your professional training for several years. Let us put another question to you: Do you speak German? The likelihood that you answer that question with a convincing «Yes, of course I do!» is rather small. If you spoke German fluently you probably wouldn’t waste your time reading this text. Have you ever asked yourself why you haven’t managed to achieve the success you wanted to? Chances are you didn’t like your German lessons, you didn’t like having to cram new complicated grammar rules into your head, you loathed vocabulary test papers, it didn’t feel good when the teacher asked you a question in German you couldn’t answer because you didn’t even understand the question. Your grades in German were never that good and that’s why you decided that you probably «Don’t have a talent for languages». This is nonsense. The fact that you speak your mother tongue freely is proof that you can acquire any other language. Period.

You still don’t believe us? Very good. No wonder you are sceptical after the language learning experiences you had at school. You didn’t make much progress. Why? To answer this question we should first take a look at how exactly we learn new information. What are the requirements for a successful learning process?

You need a sincere interest in what you are doing or better still you need a thirst for knowledge. You will only learn if your subconscious mind is ready to learn. If you feel bored or even forced to work you will waste your energy with motivating yourself. Enjoy what you are doing or don’t do it. So, you might say, there are many unpleasant things in life which I don’t enjoy at all but I still have to do them. Sure, life is full of unpleasant circumstances that we have to deal with and that’s the very reason you should have fun when you learn a language. How to learn and have fun at the same time? We’ll look into that later but now let’s illustrate another important principle with the following example:
Imagine you are sitting in a classroom with 10 or so other students and the teacher asks you to stand up and walk through the room. What would you feel like if you carried out your teacher’s request? You most certainly would be inhibited because all the eyes in the room would be focussed on you. You wouldn’t feel relaxed. You would feel awkward because you didn’t understand the reason your teacher wanted you to walk through the room. Now imagine how you would walk through the room if your teacher asked you to open the window? This time you would simply follow his request not even thinking about how to do it and why. This time your walking through the room is not the purpose but the logical means to open the window.
We only feel comfortable when we know we are doing something for a purpose.

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Jai Patel writes about German language and German culture


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Learning German – Cognates And Fake Cognates

It has been often speculated and questioned which foreign language is easier to learn for a native English speaking person or for someone that already masters the English language. Spanish has the advantage of being so widely spread and having influenced the entire world already, however it is a Latin language, hence a bit harder to adjust to. French is also quite popular, but it is also a Romance language (hence a “daughter” of Latin languages) and it’s often considered “artistic” enough as to make it harder to learn for an English speaker. German on the other hand, shares the same lexical foundations as English, both being Anglo – Saxon languages, but it is way to often related to the “German long words” which makes learning it a scary process. Still, of the three options German remains the most accessible one because of the large shared set of cognates in the English and German languages.

Cognates are words that look and sound alike in both languages and their meaning and syntactic values are also equal. Sometimes these cognates are identical, but they can often stray off by a few letters and still look and sound similar. The important thing is that they keep their shared meaning and syntactic value, becoming “fake cognates” in any other case. Fake cognates are quite numerous between the English and German languages and they will oftentimes be a hindrance to learning them. So Germans learning English will have an equal amount of trouble with fake cognates (called “falsche freunde” in German) as English speaking persons trying to learn German.

Cognates and fake cognates are sometimes divided into a few categories, as follows:

Category A (words look alike, mean alike and almost sound alike)

Examples of cognates falling in this category include: butter, winter, best, etc.

Category B (words almost look alike and they mean the same thing)

Examples of category B cognates include (German – English): bier – beer, bett – bed, faust – fist, Gott – God, haus – house, maus – mouse, laus – louse, etc.

Category C (words falling in this category are fake cognates, but they can become cognate in a specific context)

This is not a very large category of words, being an intermediary between cognates and fake cognates. Examples could include: see – see (Sea, in German), residenz – residence, etc.

Category D (words that almost look alike but never mean alike)

Words falling into these categories are pure fake cognates. Examples are abundant, such as (German – English – German true meaning): baum – beam – tree, sterben – to starve – to die, wald – weald – forest, warden – weird – to become, schmerz – smart – pain and the list could go on for a while.

Category E (words look identical but their meaning is completely different)

This is a particularization of category D fake cognates in which the two “false friend” words are identical in spelling and pronunciation. Obviously, the list is smaller, examples including (German/English – German true meaning): hall – corridor, slip – underwear, gift – poison, billion – milliard, bald – soon, etc.

You can find a more complex list of cognates and false cognates all over the Internet and it’s a good thing to start with them whenever you’re trying to start learning German. Cognates will help you a lot in understanding the German language and it will make it feel a lot closer to English than any other language. In addition, knowing fake cognates will also help you in avoiding the traps of using a word in an incorrect context.

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Increase your German vocabulary at http://www.InternetPolyglot.com/lessons-de-en by playing online games. Learn German online efficiently.


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Making It Easier To Learn German

In learning a foreign language like the German language, there certainly wouldn’t be any point if you think negatively towards it. The German language, compared to other foreign languages, is easier to comprehend even when one didn’t know what a single word means. This is because the English and German languages have similarities. A beginner can from start from this point to make the learning experience easier to understand and eventually memorize.

There can be many reasons why learning another language suddenly interests you. This is a good sign already because an interested student can learn anything and fast. Also, it’s an advantage to learn another language these days because there are many ways how to learn another language and this reason alone is already an advantage. Think how difficult it has been to those individuals who passionately wanted to learn another foreign language but were just limited in resources.

Now is your time and you can do it just from the comfort of your own home. But you don’t have to rely on the internet and don’t just because you have a dial-up connection at home doesn’t mean you can’t learn German. There are other sources for learning this language.

Language books, audio and video cassettes, DVDs and even the television with cable connection will do just fine to help you in meeting your goals. Turn to German speaking channels, even the news channel done in German will help. But since what you want to learn are going to be purely basics such as greetings, asking questions and directions both formal and informal, it isn’t advisable to take words from German newspapers just yet. The reason is newspapers use technical terms which aren’t commonly used among German speakers and which what you wont most likely hear from ordinary German speakers.

Also, in learning, there shouldn’t be any room for forced information. This is plainly because learning won’t be effective when information is forcedly squeezed in to the mind. Effective learning will not take place when this is the case and it would be better to take a rest and get back to the lesson to learn better. Or, spare 20 to an hour a day to learn the German language to prepare your mind for the activity.

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Shareen Aguilar is a writer for http://learn-german-program.com which has Memory Improvement Books and Memory Game Software for better German language memorization.


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Learn German Online

Learning a new language is often considered a costly task and people spend tons of money on buying books, courses, taking daily German lessons or paying for audio tapes, video lessons and so forth. Now, there’s an alternative to all of this: free language lessons online.


Not all languages can be learnt online. It depends on what you’re trying to learn and what your mother tongue is or what other languages you’re already familiar with. For example, learning Chinese online won’t be as easy as learning German through the same methods. Chinese requires more careful assimilation of grammar rules, vocabulary and learning steps whereas German can be learn more “freely” (and I’m not talking just about the financial costs). If you’re reading this, you’re either at least moderately familiar with English, or English is your mother tongue and this is a good starting point to learn German online, since there are a lot of connections that can be made between the two languages.


With German becoming an increasingly important language on the international stage, more and more people leave their course books behind and seek out websites that can offer free language lessons online. They’re faster, more convenient, you can go through them from the comfort of your own home and most importantly, they are much easier to assimilate, since an online lesson, unlike a course book for example, can combine visual and audio elements to make your learning process faster. In the past, this was not possible as websites were pretty blunt back then, they were just “clones” of course books with text, text and more text.


With the increased interactivity offered by many language learning sites out there, you can take online quizzes, play language games on the Internet, or on some sites, take audio/video lessons like you would from an audio or video tape. Forget about wasting time going to your local store, buying the tape, buying a good stereo and a set of headphones – now you have all these bundled up for free on the Internet. Technology is a blast, isn’t it?


Many websites (such as Internet Polyglot for example) offer a wide variety of methods to learn German, ranging from standard basic-to-advanced lessons, to word memorization games, text-video quizzes (like the ones that have you attach a specific word to a specific image – sort of like an interactive flashcard game) and so forth. Using games to increase German vocabulary or strengthen your grammar rules is also a solid option. Although many consider these games “childish”, they’re actually quite important and efficient, since you’re learning while having fun and we all know that this is a major boost to assimilating new words naturally.


One good tip would be to try and find quizzes and games that don’t simply use words. Sure, you can easily memorize a few words each day, but they won’t be “printed” in your memory as strongly as if you would have something visual attached to them. Our brain holds visual images much longer in our memory than simple strings of characters and words, so it’s a good idea to associate a picture to each word. When learning German, it’s even easier to do this since German has a lot of cognates with English (words that look or sound alike in the two languages and that share a common meaning) so you can stamp the English word instead of a visual image to the new word.


However, watch out for false cognates as they can be quite misleading. False cognates are words that sound or look alike in both languages, but their meaning is completely different, so if you don’t learn to spot them, you could be using words in completely inappropriate contexts. Fortunately, the list of false cognates is not that high between English and German, but it’s still a good idea to learn these exceptions by hard.


I’ll leave it to you to find the right websites for learning German online, but know that you shouldn’t just settle for the first one you find. Try learning from two sources and go through several websites before settling in on these two. In most cases, this will offer you a more complete coverage of the German language.

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How To Learn German The Easy Way

I’m so tired of people crying out that “learning German is so hard and so time consuming” you basically hear those guys and girls everywhere on the Internet and you have to wonder: what the heck are they doing wrong? German is one of the easiest languages to learn if you are already familiar with English and if you’re reading this, I’m pretty sure you are at least moderately familiar with it, otherwise this is just a random string of characters to you and you don’t know what on Earth I’m talking about anyway.


The German and English languages have a lot in common, due to the fact that they share the same Anglo-Saxon language base. Grammar rules are almost the same, they have many look-alike words and although German may seem a bit “rougher”, with more focus on consonants, that barrier can be easily overcome after a few language lessons. If English is your mother tongue, ironically, it will be slightly harder to get a good grip on learning German, since all your grammar rules are natural and have never really been “learnt”, but rather acquired through practice. Someone that has learnt English as a second language, will find it a lot easier to learn German afterwards (or vice versa) since these basic rules have already been assimilated the hard way.


The trick to making the German language learning process easy is to keep everything simple and fun. Yes, those two ingredients, simple and fun, make a great language learning soup. Start out slow even if you’re an adult, start out with “children techniques”. Learn the basic words, numbers, colors, months, days and so forth and familiarize yourself with the writing style, pronunciation and try to find links between these words and their English counterparts (what does the “Montag” day of the week look similar to in English? Etc). The natural progression in any language learning process is to get the grip on some grammar rules after you’ve accustomed yourself with the language through the basic words. Like I said above, this will be easy for an English speaker.


Next up, work on increasing vocabulary in German. Use language games, flashcards, mnemonics and everything in between that can stick a word to a picture. The word-picture combination is a great way to memorize words as they will be absorbed faster by your brain, they’re fun and most importantly, your brain will hardly forget the picture, leaving you with a sidewalk to the word in case you forget it.


One last thing worth noting: this is a general tip but it applies great to learning German. Don’t forget to revise what you’ve learnt, otherwise you will just assimilate new stuff and forget a good part of what you learnt earlier. If possible, try to expand what you learned earlier and not go for a different subject (for example, if you just learn the basic words in the “vegetables” field, try working your way from there to the “kitchen” or “farming” fields so you’ll still use the words you assimilated earlier). Make sure you don’t over-revise either. It won’t hurt, but you will lose precious time for nothing and that time is better spent to improve vocabulary, focus on the grammar or working on pronunciation and spelling.


I’ve seen some disputes as to whether or not “natural language learning” is beneficial or not. It involves learning a language through direct contact with it, instead of taking it step by step. For example, watching a TV show in German, reading a book in German or simply hearing two people speak the language is considered natural learning. The advantage of natural learning is that you can easily grasp new words out of the context. If you understand 70% of what a person is saying, you’ll be able to decipher the other 30% and what those particular words mean by a natural deduction. This is a great way to add words to your vocabulary and if you can’t get a new word out of the context, or you’re not sure what it means, simply write it down and check the dictionary for it later.


The disadvantage of this method is related mostly to TV shows, audio tapes and so forth (less with books and magazines): sometimes the speakers will talk a German dialect or they’ll talk with an accent, making it very hard for you to learn anything constructive from them. That’s why you should always choose the shows or audio tapes that feature someone talking “clean” German as much as possible.

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