Various Articles

Some people want to learn German but say it is too hard when they are faced with the obstacles of German grammar and the sometimes confusing vocabulary. The German language may be not an easy language to learn but it definitely is a very fascinating one. In case you are a native English speaker you might find a lot 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 some words get quite similar to English.

This may be one of the reasons why there are many web sites written in English doing a good job teaching the German language. They are able to use examples from English that people can easily recognize and then translate them intuitively to easily comprehend the respective German phrases.

Something that makes it hard for certain students to learn German is that most text books are too abstract and boring. This is why students of the German Language love 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. But to truly 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 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 chapter of a paid program or an expensive product.

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

Although you may want to - 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 twist the language around and are not good examples of German grammar. Some use very old-fashioned and poetry-style language. So don't use it.

Do not read German newspapers. Newspapers in Germany 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 what the beginning was. Newspapers are clearly for the advanced language learner. So please stay away from them in the beginning.