I thinking about learning German , and I wonder How hard will it be , my English his very well and I know some French – are these languages similar in some ways ?
To start, English is an Anglo-Saxon language and French is based on Latin. German is Teutonic-based. There is almost no similarity between the two and German. In addition, the syntax and grammar of German have almost no similarity to the two. If you would really like to prove this toyourself spend a few hours listening to German and read some texts. That should convince you.
I agree with the above poster, and as a native speaker of English who has been learning German for a few years, I would like to add a few facts and personal observations of mine.
While the languages are very different, both English and German share a few common bases. English grammar used to be almost identical to today's German grammar, in the days of old and early middle English. This doesn't have much effect on how both languages are used today, but you will find that in modern spoken German, many parts of the vocabulary are "borrowed" from English. This is something common is all parts of the German language, including verbs. Like they say - what goes around comes around. Words like "Sport, Telefon, Banane" are all words which an English speaker should feel right at home with.
You will find similarities in many parts of German: The English "is" is the German "ist". The English "was" is the German "war". The English "can" is the German "kann". The English "must" is the German "muss".
Knowing French will aid you in pronunciation; German shares many "sharp" and "splitting" sounds with French which do not exist in English. The best examples for these are the German "L", the German "R" and the Umlaut "Ü". German has more grammatical similarities to French than English (for example, the use of the polite form "Vous", "Sie" in German, does not exist in English).
Overall, while these languages aren't directly similar, knowing both English and French will aid you in different ways.
There are a wealth of cognates between German and English - especially if you familiarize yourself with regular phonological shifts between the two languages - in addition to some grammatical similarity. It is also true that modern German not only has many loan-words from English, it also has many loan-words from French. These they tend to pronounce much more true to the original French pronunciation than most English speakers would, so knowing French helps there. Many scientific, Latin-based words in German are pronounced more like they are in French than in English.
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