![]() Take time to familiarise yourself with the alphabet and pronunciation of common sounds and practice regularly. This will change once you’ve learned the fundamentals by heart. This will change with enough exposure to the language but it does take some time.Īt first, it will be easier to recognise words being spoken than to pronounce them perfectly yourself. Finally, ‘ ß’ is simply pronounced as a double ‘s’.Īccept that you will have a foreign-sounding accent in the beginning. ![]() The ‘ä’ is pronounced like ‘e’ in ‘telling’.There are also four extra letters to mention, but they won’t give you as much trouble as the ‘R’. Eventually, it will start to feel more natural. There’s no pressure to get the hang of it in the beginning, so just fake it as well as you can And keep working on it. The most difficult letter to get right is the trilled ‘R’ but even this sound is pretty manageable with a little practice. You can read my in-depth guide to German pronunciation here. Once you’ve mastered each letter, you’ll be able to pronounce almost every word. The best way to learn German pronunciation is by starting with the alphabet. In English, letters often change sounds without any logical explanation. However, it’s much easier to pronounce words phonetically in German than in English. Many people blindly assume that German is difficult to pronounce. Wherever you see -ig, -lich, -isch, and -ität in German, you may be able to translate by using -(l)y, -al, -ic, or -ful in English instead. Sometimes z changes to a soft c in English. However, this rule isn’t always applicable. This works similarly with z, tz, s, and ss which change to a ‘t’. For example, sometimes the English equivalent of a German word can be created by changing pf, ff, or f into a p, such as in Pfeffer (pepper), offen (open), and helfen (help). To start decoding German words, it can help to know a few simple tricks. There’s very little difference between the two phrases except for a couple of sounds that have developed one way in English and slightly differently in German.Īs we can see, even words spelled differently in German can be decoded with little effort. If we examine the phrases “what is that?” and “was ist das?”, the connections are obvious. For example, “I have” and “ich habe” are incredibly similar. These include the most basic and frequently used expressions. What you might not realise is that 80% of the most common English words have Germanic origins. Without knowing any German, you can probably guess what the English equivalents are of the following months: Right away, learning the basics of German just got a whole lot easier! These include all the months of the year as well as lots of other common everyday vocabulary. And the good news is that English and German share a lot of them! Since they both developed separately from the same shared ancestor, they still share a large number of cognates.Ĭognates are words that are pronounced or spelled similarly in two different languages that also have similar meanings. “Hey, I Know That Word!”: English And German CognatesĮnglish, with 400 million native speakers, and German, with 100 million native speakers, are the two most widely-spoken West Germanic languages. Otherwise, keep scrolling to find out: is German hard to learn? If you prefer watching videos, hit play to watch the video version of this post. Along with a few tips and tricks, you can learn German in no time at all. Pronunciation is also more straightforward than you might think and grammar is easy to pick up thanks to easily recognisable patterns. One of the main reasons German isn’t all that hard to learn is that German and English originate from the same language families and share more similarities than you probably realise.īoth German and English are Indo-European languages that stem from the Germanic family of languages.Ībout 40% of German vocabulary is similar to English vocabulary, which is good news for native English speakers! If you're ready to get started, click here for your free 7-day trial. This comprehensive beginner German programme teaches you through the power of story and will have you speaking confident German in no time. In this article, you’ll find out why.īy the way, the fastest and easiest way to learn German (and enjoy doing it)? However, German actually isn’t nearly as hard to learn as you might think. Seemingly endless compound words and the concept of noun genders is often enough to scare people off learning German for good. Many beginner level language students have the misconception that German is an almost impossible language to learn.
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