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.