How to improve my German as an English native speaker?
The language is known today as German is believed to have originated from Proto-Germanic, which began to develop around 2000 B.C., as people began to settle in western areas of the Baltic Sea. The first-ever record of the German language dates back to a time when the Romans came into contact with inhabitants of the Rhine-Danube area during their occupation in the first century BC. Since then German has gone through many changes, from Old High German (from about 700 AD to the eleventh century); Middle High German (from about 1050 to 1350); Early New High German (1350 to 1600) to New High German (from about 1600 to the present). Modern-day German often referred to as “High German”, or Hochdeutsch, used as the language of administration, higher education, literature, and the mass media, is likely to be unrecognisable from the language that the Romans first observed.
English is the official language in 54 countries that cover Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Australasia, and which include countries as diverse as New Zealand, South Africa, Belize, India, Malta, and Singapore. This means that English is a truly universal language that makes communication across the globe easy and convenient. In addition, the British Council estimates that more than 1 billion people are learning English as a second language at any given time. English is taught at school as a second language in hundreds of countries all over the world, from France to Thailand, Israel to Malaysia, in Sweden, China, and in many other countries.
The history of the two languages connects both the languages with each other. Both the German and English languages are considered to be members of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family, meaning they are still closely related today. Moreover, both use the Latin alphabet and have incredible similarities when pronunciation and sentence formation is considered. Let’s understand their similarities in detail:
First of all, FSI [Foreign Service Institute of languages] classifies all the languages in the world into 5 different categories on the basis of difficulty to learn for an English native speaker, German ranks in Category 2, which is one of the easiest languages to learn due to their uncanny similarities. This means that as a native English speaker, learning German is going to be a cakewalk for you. Secondly, several German words have been incorporated into the English language. Similarly, multiple English words have also found their place within the German language. Therefore, as an English speaker, you probably already know a decent amount of German. Apart from this both the languages often follow the same grammatical rules and Arabic numbering system. With that said, we can conclude that German and English share major similarities with each other.