5 Surprising Ways German and English Are Similar

Ask a room of English speakers what they make of German and the same three complaints arrive: the words are too long, the nouns have genders, and the verb turns up late.

Then somebody mentions that the German for glove is Handschuh — a hand-shoe — and the mood changes.

German has not suddenly become easy. It has, for a moment, stopped being foreign.

That moment is worth taking seriously, because it is not a trick of the light. English and German are not neighbours who picked up each other’s habits. They are cousins on the same branch of the family tree: both West Germanic, alongside Dutch and Frisian, and both still carrying a core of everyday words and the same instinct for building new words out of old ones.

A great deal of what looks alien in German is English wearing different clothes.

1. The two languages grew from the same root

English did not borrow itself into existence from German. Both descend from the West Germanic branch of the family, alongside Dutch and Frisian. Germanic-speaking peoples settled in Britain during the early medieval centuries, and the language they brought — Old English — was spoken and written here for centuries before French arrived.

The Norman conquest of 1066 changed the balance rather than the foundations. French took the commanding heights of English life — law, government, the dinner table — and left its vocabulary there.

Underneath, the Germanic language carried on. That is why the oldest and plainest words in English so often have an obvious German twin: house and Haus, water and Wasser, hand and Hand, come and kommen.

When you speak English at its most ordinary, you are speaking the part of it that German recognises.

2. You already know a surprising number of German words

Some German words in English announce themselves at the table: pretzel, strudel, spritzer. Others have naturalised so completely that nobody questions them. Rucksack is German. So is delicatessen. So is angst — though in German Angst is simply fear, and the existential shading is an English addition. A small lesson in how borrowing works.

The traffic runs in both directions, and these days it runs harder the other way. German reaches for English whenever something new arrives: der Computer, das Image, der Laser, das Meeting.

So before you learn a single rule, you are not starting from nothing. You are starting from a shared vocabulary you have been using all your life without noticing.

3. The grammar rhymes more often than it fights

English speakers brace for German grammar and are then surprised by how much of it they already do. English changes a vowel to change a tense — swim, swam, swum — and German does exactly the same: schwimmen, schwamm, geschwommen. Sing, sang, sung sits beside singen, sang, gesungen.

These are not coincidences to be memorised one at a time. They are the same inherited pattern, still running in both languages.

Word order is where people expect the fight, and there is a real difference: German sends the verb to the end of subordinate clauses in a way modern English does not. But English is not innocent of the habit. It still flips subject and verb after certain openings — never have I seen, here comes the train — the surviving shadow of an older, freer order.

German kept the rule. English kept the reflex.

4. You can already read the alphabet — and German plays fairer with it

Both languages write in the Latin alphabet. German adds four characters — ä, ö, ü and ß — and that is the whole of the difference on the page. Nothing has to be relearnt from scratch, and nothing has to be transliterated in your head before you can begin.

There is a bonus hidden in that similarity. German spelling follows an official, regularly maintained set of rules, and the fit between letters and sounds is close enough that once you know the system you can read aloud a word you have never met and be very nearly right.

English offers no such courtesy. Though, through and tough are three different sounds wearing nearly the same coat.

You are used to spelling being a trap. In German, it is a map.

5. Both languages build long words out of short ones

German’s reputation for enormous words is the thing people mention first and understand least. Handschuh is hand plus shoe. Fernseher, a television, is a far-seer. Fingerhut, a thimble, is a finger-hat. These are not feats of vocabulary. They are ordinary words pushed together, and once you can see the join, the word reads itself.

English does the identical thing and hides it with a space bar. Toothbrush, railway station, breakfast, motorway, handbook: all compounds, all built from parts a child knows.

The difference here is a typographical convention, not a way of thinking. Which means the famous German long word is not a wall. It is an invitation to break something into pieces you already recognise — a skill you have had since you first worked out what a lighthouse was.

None of this makes German effortless. The cases are real, the genders have to be learnt, and there will be evenings when the verb at the end of the sentence feels like a personal insult.

But the question most English speakers actually ask — is German similar to English? — has a clearer answer than the language’s reputation suggests. Yes. The two sit in the same family and still share their oldest vocabulary, their verb patterns and their way of assembling words. Dutch and Frisian sit closer to English still; German is simply the relative most of us actually end up in a classroom with.

What that changes is not the workload. It is the starting position. You are not standing at a wall, learning a system built by strangers. You are meeting a relative who never anglicised: same bones, different spelling, a thousand years of separate habits.

So start from what you already have. Read the long word instead of flinching at it. Say the plain words out loud and listen for the ones you know.

You will still have to learn German. You simply will not be learning it from a standing start.