This original English language that was infiltrated by French and Latin, called Anglo-Saxon, gets its name from the Germanic tribes who migrated there around 500-800 A.D. However, England was already full of Germanic tribes who were speaking a kind of Old English, using words like ich, finde, Hand and many others that are still used in German today. The French-speaking Normans invaded England in 1066 (led by that old rascal William the Conqueror), bringing a slew of French and Latin words with them to England. Much of our modern English vocabulary comes from Latin.

5 Surprising Connections Between English and German 1. Your brain has already been exposed to more of the German language’s key elements than you may have realized. While they may have fallen out of common usage, there are still a few remainders to be found in somewhat unexpected places today. Say what? Yes indeed. The two languages have grown and changed, intermingled and drifted apart, through various invasions and migrations in Europe.Įnglish has shed quite a lot of these grammatical rules over the last few hundred years. Everything that we find difficult in modern German, from cases to gender to movable sentence structure, these all once existed in English. What have emperors, kings, traders, invasions and wars got to do with learning the difference between all the German cases? Quite a lot, actually.īecause the two languages were once the same, the grammar of English and German is quite similar, even if we don’t always recognize it so easily in English. (Download) Why Is History Important for German Learners? This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that youĬlick here to get a copy. 5 Surprising Connections Between English and German.Why Is History Important for German Learners?.You might be surprised at what you discover! Instead of picking out what we don’t know about the language, let’s take a look at some of the ways that German and English are actually similar. The relationship between English and German is all but ancient history- the two languages are long-lost linguistic siblings.īut when English speakers are learning German, it seems like we’re all too quick to focus on the elements of our new language that seem foreign, obtuse, archaic and totally difficult to learn. Febru5 Surprising Similarities Between German and English That’ll Help You Learn German Today

Low german words in english