Really Want to Learn German?
Some people want to learn German but find it difficult when they are faced with the obstacles of the complex German grammar and the complicated vocabulary. The German language might not be the easiest one to learn but it definitely is a very fascinating one. If you are a native English speaker you are able to see a great deal of similarities and find many clues that English and German actually belong to the same family.
A fascinating fact you find when learning German is that actually German is the language most similar to English - in fact English is more similar to German than any other language. This is because English and German both belong to the same family of languages: The Germanic Languages. In Europe three language families dominate: Germanic, Romanic and Slavic.
A fascinating fact is that in Northern Germany - located closer to England than the southern part - the dialect versions of particular words become quite similar to English.
This may be one of the reasons why there are many web sites written in English doing a fantastic job teaching the German language. These sites are able to use examples from English that most students can easily recognize and then translate them intuitively to better understand the respective German version of the expression.
A fact that makes it quite complicated 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 examples with pictures or audio tutorials. The drawback of text books is always that they are exactly what their name suggests: Books with text. However, to learn a language we need to hear and speak it. This is why any type of multimedia tutorial is perfect for beginners.
If you want to find a free German language lesson you can easily find some examples on the net. However, most free lessons turn out to be just a trial version or the first part of a paid program or an expensive product.
If you are more interested in complete free German tutorials - check out this list of online 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. Newspapers in Germany are usually political and use a a type of language which is not easy to understand. The sentences are extremely long, so usually when you get to the end you cannot remember what the beginning was. Newspapers are clearly for the advanced language learner. So please stay away from them when you start out.
To find the best online resources to learn German go to the Learn German Links site. We constantly collect the best sites to help you master this difficult language.
Published March 3rd, 2007
Filed in Career




