I don’t know who has misunderstood whom. I didn’t discount your experience, only your conclusions which go against measurable facts. If I, as a non-native speaker, with no closer connection to German than English can make those connections, I don’t know why a native speaker would be any less capable to do so. Out of that list I knew or could figure directly about half and the rest I looked up. Now I could remember all of them after looking them up once. Even if the spelling is the same you still need to look up meaning to make sure it hasn’t changed so I don’t know why looking up meaning to see if there is a connection is any different.
It boggles my mind that you would discount even alle, in and für from listing, but even the others are obvious if you open your mind. French gives you spelling easier, but have to learn pronunciation. German gives you pronunciation, but spelling is a little different. You win some, you lose some.
If German spelling was as bogus as English or French spelling, all those German words could be spelled the same way as in English, but would it make learning the language any easier? But you say it made learning French easier because you got bogus spelling. Would you feel like they were close to English if you had to learn them by hearing? Languages are first and foremost spoken and written form is just a made-up presentation of that. It means very little if one language uses d instead of t. That’s why linguistical comparison uses sounds rather than letters.
You will always have words that just don’t stick. After all 30% of German isn’t related to English, but the same number for French is 40%. From your list bieten is related to English bid and based on google translate has a similar meaning. See if it sticks now. I can tell from experience that it works and I don’t see any reason why everyone couldn’t learn that too.
The comprehensive input hypothesis states that our brains will get more and more accustomed to the foreign words. This includes that the words will not come “one in a line, please” into our brains, but through a parallel learning process. As a result, you will not be able to count the learned words. You will have learned lots of words, but each of them only partly, maybe 25%. Still, you will feel more and more comfortable with foreign audio. I will verify this hypothesis end of June. I then will check whether I had a progress in my foreign language since beginning of this year. The measurement will be my ability to understand YouTube videos in the foreign language.
Small helper words don’t add anything to the meaning. All what? For what? The French text has lot of obvious nouns.
No, the issue isn’t spelling. Ehnärung, erzählen, entdecken, Ausstellung and so on.
You keep misusing statistics. related to is a very vague term. English is related to Russian, Latin and proto-indo-European. In practice French is far closer to English in terms of vocabulary and word order. About 60% of English comes from Latin and French, often with the same or almost the same spelling. An English speaker with a large vocabulary will benefit massively, as these words tend to be in the higher or more formal register. If you don’t have a large English vocabulary, words such as elucidate, infraction and limpid, then you won’t see this.
According to my big English-German dictionary and the examples I have come across Bieten means to offer, to provide, not to bid.
That matches my experience. I’ve recently increased the quantity of CI that I use, I’m hoping that huge amounts of relatively simple German will create and reinforce long term memories. Certainly I am making progress, it feels more comfortable and more natural.
That’s not what you said when you made the listing, but words that have a similar spelling. For me, the lack of those words made it hard to make sense of the others in French. Those words are a huge part of the German language and help especially at the start. If you have studied French before the latest effort, you probably had the start easier and thus it’s hard to make a comparison.
No, the issue isn’t spelling. Ehnärung, erzählen, entdecken, Ausstellung and so on.
Maybe reading comprehension then. I didn’t refer to your spelling, but the spelling of the language (the actual spoken one) between those languages. If for example antwort was spelled answer in German, but pronounced as it is in German it wouldn’t make it easier to learn the language as a whole. Not to mention making it more similar. It’s only spelling. But you are saying that French is easier because it’s “misspelled” compared to the actual language. You very well know that you wouldn’t have recognized the words you gave as an example if they were said instead of written. You have to learn both to learn the word.
No, you don’t make a comparison between languages, but only spelling. There is the problem. Spelling is not a language. Also German has a huge amount of loan words from Latin and Latin based languages. You just are discounting those relations because of arbitrary spelling differences. Like Szenerien shouldn’t be too hard to see, yet you discount even the most obvious Latin based words. Not to mention all Germanic based for “being too basic”. I’m only telling how languages (still not just spelling) are. I can’t make you see things that are obvious to others.
If French was so close to English, why are French so bad at learning English? I know there are reasons like culture, but still, even the ones who actually decide to learn are worse than those from Germany. Similarly English speakers don’t seem to learn French that easily. Obviously the reason is that they aren’t that closely related.
Really? Offer is bid. And you can find it in a dictionary as one meaning for bieten. The point is to give some sense to the word so that it’s easier to see from the context. Almost any word has countless meanings and even having words spelled the same doesn’t mean they are used the same way, ever. I have seen that with Spanish and it must happen in French too. It’s even easier to learn words that have little to nothing in common in spelling rather than trying to overwrite what you have already learned in another language.
I don’t think there is any more I can say. If you don’t want to see it, then you won’t see it. It’s up to you if you want to take advantage of it or carry on believing that German is somehow inherently difficult to learn for you.
You can’t assume that small words that look similar to an English word have the same meaning. Why not fur or fear or far as meanings for für when one has no idea? Thus à means a, the indefinite article, and pour means to pour, according to your logic. Do you not understand that a word like dialogue is massively more likely to mean dialogue in English? And that word carries far more useful meaning.
Utter nonsense. Is ?? climbed ?? ?? bus ?? France less meaningful than ?? ?? into a ?? to ?? ?
Obviously. You’ve completely missed the point, again. The point, which was very clear, is that for an English speaker, German contains massive amounts of impenetrable vocabulary, at least at the start.
French is not misspelled. dialogue, inaudible, fabrication, passage, film and so on are pronounced clearly, albeit à la Inspector Clouseau.
Utter nonsense.
You missed the point, yet again. Please reread what I actually wrote.
I was talking about my experience as a native English speaker of learning French, not vice versa. What the hell has the difficulty of English for the French to do with that? If you recall, I pointed out that latinate words in English tend to belong to the higher register. Thus the French have to learn huge numbers of completely new words when learning ordinary (non scientific) English.
And I’ve already explained that German and English are phonetically closer, sharing stress based timing for example. You continually mix everything up.
Actually British people don’t learn any language that easily.
Not according to my Oxford German dictionary that measures 4” thick by 10” by 8”. I’m sure you will find a copy to measure, and point out that my measurements are imprecise such is your love of pointlessness. Maybe it does mean bid, but I use the tools at hand.
However, that is missing the point, it is just not true that German has anywhere as many words that directly correlate to English words as does French.
So, you a non native English speaker (with a much smaller vocabulary missing huge numbers of latinate words), who is not learning German, are telling me, a native English speaker currently learning German, that my experiences of learning German are completely wrong.
To be honest I really don’t care what your opinions are. wernecmn had it right, the brain learns through gradual exposure to the language. My problem was insufficient input.
I found German very hard at the start. It is starting to get easier because I have increased the amount of comprehensible input I use. Also as I progress I am coming across more compound words, which I can guess. Thus Ausstellung is not so hard to remember once one knows aus and stellen. Similarly for Vorstellungsgespräch. It is often said that German is mich harder than French at the start, but it gets easier later on.
No, it’s not. Meanings vary just as much, whether they are spelled the same or not. I have said it quite clearly; you look if there is a connection and that reminds you to look for meanings that have similar spelling.
Ofcourse it is when you misspresent it. It’s not one or other. Instead you get those on top of the ones that are similar because of shared Latin origin. That’s were you get 70% lexical similarity between german and English whereas English and French has. German has little less those of latin origin, but on top of that there are words of Germanic origin.
No, you make those walls yourself. They are obvious to others.
They are just as different as the ones that you discarded because of different spelling. Sometimes even further. You just need to work the other way around to see connections.
No, you still are making up definitions to fit your presumption.
Non-native with an average native vocabulary. Because my German is quite non-existent it makes it possible to look at it from the outside. If I can with a quick scan make out the words that are close and are possible to learn quickly, so should everyone else. I have also learned Spanish which also spells more or less as pronounced and so even Latin based words wouldn’t meet your criterion as being close enough yet to me they seem obvious, and I’m sure many others feel the way too. Words like curiosamente you should know where it points and when you know that -mente ending often is the same as -ly in English you know what it means. This is the norm with Latin based words with often less common and rarely words that match exactly. They aren’t any less obvious if their spelling matches written form better with a little spice from the language.
I did already say that I don’t doubt your experiences, just the conclusions make from them. Professionals rank French as category 1 and German as category in difficulty which is a small difference and it’s relatedness or lexicon that makes that difference, but grammar.
Just like I said from the beginning. You are making rushed conclusions based on language that you have already learned to a high degree and comparing it to language that you are just starting. We have a saying that loosely translates to “time golds memories” ie you forget struggles and remember the successes.
Your initial count had under 30% of words that are given, which might be close to what it is overall. What is certain is that not all shared lexicon is as similar as your criterion. So there are a lot more words that you have to work for in any case which makes it unlikely that even if there are more words in French that meet your criterion than in German, it’s still going to be the others that make the most of the work. Up to you if you make it easier or harder for you by discounting what could help to remember.
In any case, this is going circless. If you don’t want to believe or take the hints, then you don’t. But you are holding yourself back for no reason.
Those words - dialogue etc - have an almost direct mapping to English.
You’ve clearly read a statistic, that English has a 70% lexical similarity to German, and not understood what it means. You need to read more deeply.
Firstly, you haven’t defined precisely what you mean by lexical similarity when you use the term. It’s vague, change the definition and it could drop to 40% or 20%.
Secondly, we can make the figure high if we just count all non unique occurences of words of Germanic origin in English. Thus for example we have the, a, one, to, for. And of course we have helper verbs such as have and to be, which greatly increases the count. Then we might count words where the mapping is hidden, and easily missed. Your example of bieten is one such example.
A better and more useful measure of the similarity between two languages is the number of words in common. Thus about 60% of words in English are of latinate origin. About 30% are of Germanic origin.
However, Germanic origin includes words from Old Norse and Anglo Saxon, as well as Dutch and to a lesser extent, middle and High German, modern Swedish etc. The Anglo Saxon and Old Norse words date from up to 1,500 years ago, and have often changed so much that the German equivalent is unrecognisable. Also, knowing that have and haben are cognates doesn’t mean the student doesn’t have to remember the more complex German conjugations, especially when we go to tenses other than the present.
Latinate words arrived from Norman French, thus beef and mutton, and from French and Latin over the following centuries, especially during the enlightenment, and are often very similar to modern French words such as inciter and dissuasion.
So no, lexical similarity is a poor measure of the ease of learning a foreign language.
I don’t and they are not. I have given countless examples that have no obvious equivalence such as entdecken, Ehnährung, Austellung, Wohnung, Gewohnheit, Wohngemeinschaft and so on. These are not the exception but the norm.
You are writing nonsense.
You have not understood what I wrote. It wasn’t difficult to understand.
Actually if you look closer at the FSI ratings, which is what I assume you refer to, they state that French is harder than other category 1 languages and roughly equivalent to German in terms of class hours. That is because of the grammar, and the pronunciation. Thus many verb conjugations sound the same, but have different spellings such as vois, voit and voient, weird verb conjugations such as finit and finissons, and then beauties such as the subjunctive which is often very irregular.
As I have said many times, there is general agreement - do some research - that French is initially easier than German, but as you get more proficient, German is easier because it is more regular.
Utter nonsense. I remember well when I started learning French and vocabulary was not the issue. Pronouncing the language and understanding spoken French was the hard part.
You continually misread my posts, and misinterpret statistics.
The quotes above kinda sum up it all when you contradict yourself and highlight the point that I have been trying to make. The actual words are many times worlds apart between French and English, but you concentrate on the few that are written the same, even when pronunciation is unintelligible. And no, it’s not just some Inspector Clouseau pronunciation when you look at it from the outside. You have already learnt the language which means that your brain tries to make sense of it.
Maybe you should yourself get to know what lexical similarity means before making statements about its validity. Words get more points the closer they are so if German was that different it wouldn’t get those points and French would get more if it really was that close. The problem with your assessment of French is that not all 60% of common origin are anywhere near to English even with the common origin. On the other hand, German also has many of those same loanwords. Even if the common Germanic origin words are on average more different, there is already so much common with other origins that those similarities with Germanic origin are what brings it to the top.
At the moment I’m learning Swedish, which has similar lexical similarity to English as German, and there are so many easy pick-ups that are similar in English. Many, probably most of those, are of Latin origin and some shared Germanic origin. Of course many also are in no way close, but that’s true with any two languages. If you concentrate on what’s hard instead of easy, then it probably feels hard.
But I’ll stop here. This is pointless if half the time you resort to calling my answers nonsense and the other half going of the track making points that are in no way relevant to the premise of the argument. Linguistics have studied these things quite a lot to come up with measurements that make sense. If those don’t make sense to you, fine, but then you are missing a whole lot of what languages are.
I can’t make head nor tail of this. Where have I contradicted myself?
No, pronunciation of dialogue and film are not unintelligible, they are easy to hear, and they are no different to brot and bruder compared to bread and brother.
The point I am making, and have made countless times, is very simple. English and French share so much vocabulary, far far more than German and English, and that is extremely helpful for the language learner, at least at the outset.
You keep referring to lexical similarity without defining precisely what you mean. Please define your use of the term.
You make a claim with no links, no sources, no details. How can anyone comment on that?
I honestly think you are trolling as you don’t seem to read what I wrote.
As I have said, do some research, you’ll find general agreement that German is initially harder, but becomes easier as the student progresses.
You say French pronunciation is hard and also say it is just inspector Clouseau variation of English. Both might be true, but not at the same time. First was true when you were first learning and second once you were more advanced.
This is what I have been saying all along, but you have been discarding it because one is spelled differently. The closeness of words or languages is not measured only in how they are spelled but in how they are pronounced.
And the point I have tried to make is that it is not true, no matter what you think.
Lexical similarity as in linguistics. If you make assertions about how close two languages are, you should be aware of what it means.
You have done that also, so? I mean, you are the one making claims that are contrary to conventional linguistics and only based on how you feel is not a very strong argument. Your a few thousand words against people that have spend their whole lives studying the matter.
Making personal assumptions doesn’t help your argument. I do read what you write, but what you write for the most part has nothing to do with how similar vocabularies are.
I’m not saying that German can’t be harder initially, but it’s not because vocabulary is far off or that French is closer to English. One thing I came across is that 70% of English text (so not vocab) is of Germanic origin and the same is likely to be the case with German texts too. Probably more with simple texts. It’s possible that early on there are more words that don’t fit your definition, but that’s why I said not to be rigid about it.
There are lots of other factors to consider instead of making claims contrary to all that we know about languages, just because you feel like that’s what is hindering your progress.
I have absolutely no idea what you are trying to say.
When I started learning French, I struggled with pronouncing the French guttural r sound, and the pure vowels, for example the vowels in pur, pour and fleur.
With German I have the advantage that I can do the guttural r sound, and I have so much experience of learning new consonants in French and Welsh, that I now know how to go about learning German sounds, such as the two ch consonants. I also know that my hearing is not yet sufficiently developed in German.
I have never said any such thing. What I have said, countless times, is that German is full of words with no counterpart in English.
And yet countless sources confirm that English has about 60% latinate vocabulary. The amount shared with German is significantly less. Source:
You can also look on Wikipedia and elsewhere.
Why do you refuse to say precisely what you mean by lexical similarity ?
Whilst you refuse to define what you mean, in general lexical similarity (in loose terms) between English and German is increased by the underlying structure being largely Germanic. Thus it is full of words such as the, this, they, them, he, it, one, two, to, and, full and so on. However German has words such as er, sie, ihr, ihm, ihn, alle, allen, letzten which might qualify for lexical similarity, but many are not readily intelligible.
Also English uses a lot of expressions along the lines of put down, put up, put over, set up, set down and so on which increases the lexical similarity, but knowing individual words does not tell you what put down the dog means, and it does not help with understanding German.
What claims have I made that are contrary to conventional liguistics? What you have written is rhetoric with absolutely no specifics.
I have many times suggested you do some research online to find out what people, or at least those who post on the internet, say about learning French and German. That isn’t a personal assumption.
Really? You say it there word for word, yet you deny it?
No, it says at most 60% has Latin origin. That also includes words that don’t have much in common with their English counterpart.
I’m not the one to define lexical similarity, it’s experts who define it. You should read about lexical similarity before you make claims about it. If you are not even aware of what it means, how can you make claims about it? German words that you highlighted would get little to no points in lexical similarity, apart from alle and allen. It’s not like lexical similarity takes all words with vague similarity and counts them, even if it might be quite obvious. Like some wouldn’t count du=you pair. And it seems that the higher you put the threshold, the more French similarity will fall compared to German similarity as some calculations will put lexical similarity between German and English at 60% and English and French at 27%. In other words, French has more vaguely similar words to English than German does.
Obviously phrasal verbs aren’t included in lexical similarity It’s LEXICAL similarity.
That French and English are closer than English and German?
Calling someone a troll, arrogant etc is a personal assumption.
This is not how lexical similarity is calculated. Subjective experiences are only subjective experiences.
Clearly you cannot read. By the way I gave you countless German words with no counterpart in English.
Except that reality contradicts your assertion, as the vast majority are rather similar in French and English. Words such as inciter, culminer, terminer, dépression, mont, limpide, infraction and so on. And our spelling was highly influenced by Norman French. Whereas most Germanic words, other than the more common ones, are cryptic. An example is awe and awesome. Take the word holen, which shares the same Germanic root as haul. The latter came from French, which borrowed it from Dutch or Old German. Thus it is a Germanic word, but it certainly does not help me learn holen.
Most Germanic words in English words arrived after the departure of the romans in the fifth century AD, and before the Norman Conquest in 1066. The Anglo Saxons first arrived in 449 AD, and more came over the next century or two, more precisely Saxons, Angles and Jutes. The vikings started arriving around 793 until 1066, bringing Old Norse. So our West Germanic vocabulary arrived about 1,400 to 1,500 years ago. Old Norse vocabulary arrived at least 1,000 years ago but it had already separated from west Germanic about 1,000 years earlier.
Norman French started making contributions to English over the centuries following 1066. We also had huge borrowings in the following centuries, with massive latinate borrowings for science and technology during the enlightenment for example.
Germanic words will have had far more time to change than the more recent French and latinate contributions. Of course the commonly used Germanic words such as house, father and bread have remained relatively unchanged, as have early Norman borrowings such as mutton, pork and beef, frequency of use tends to slow the evolution of a word.
Key to language learning is the learning of vocabulary. It is a core requirement. Estimates are that about 25% of English is of Germanic origin (Old German, Dutch, Old Norse, etc), and about 60% from Norman French, French and latin, with less from other romance languages. Thus the English speaking learner has a huge advantage with French when it comes to learning vocabulary, at least in the early stages.
It is your invention that conventional linguistics claim that English is closer to German than English. One research paper makes a claim about lexical similarity. I have commented that in terms of percentage vocabulary, English has more in common with French. That is backed by linguistics. In addition, French and English have similar word order, and almost always SVO, German has SVO, SOV and verb second. German also has a complex case system absent from French and English. English is technically a West Germanic language but it has undergone massive changes, and the reasons for which are still argued over. It is very much a hybrid. Incidentally proto-Germanic is also believed to be a hybrid.
You behave as if you are trolling, you repeatedly attribute to me things I did not say, and you use condescending remarks.
You take an academic calculation - which is one measure of the closeness of two languages - and then falsely claim that it precisely measures the difficulty of learning a language. What’s more, the figures you quote are from one research paper, others come to rather different conclusions. As for subjective opinions I think you will find that linguistics is full of subjective experiences and opinions and there are no precise measures of the difficulty of learning a language. Steve Kaufmann’s videos are full of subjective experiences and he often argues against conventiinal wisdom in language teaching. Chomsky’s linguistics are full of assumptions with zero proof, and universal grammar will in my opinion disappear.
You cannot take one calculation of lexical similarity and then assume that tells you how hard a language is for the beginner learner which is what you are doing.
A couple of stories on the Iran Israel conflict:
Even though I have studied German for hundreds of hours, the Der Spiegel story is largely impenetrable. I have recently increased my comprehensible input in the hope that some vocabulary will stick.
You don’t bring anything to the table expect a few words instead of looking at the whole picture. On top of that you are using words like film which is of Germanic origin.
It’s not even one study, instead I can’t find anything that contradicts it. You can post one if you find it, other than just an unrelated etymology study. What I could find however is that French and English share 1700 true cognates. Hardly a big part of either of the languages now, is it? Others are either too different or have a different meaning. Lexical similarity only uses words that have the same meaning so you might have less from the outside, but more on the inside. You see more in common where there isn’t and less in common where there actually is. If you look at the lexical similarity calculation between English and French, you get high similarities between words like night/nuit, three/trois and wind/vent. Hardly makes your cut, does it? If you look at just etymology as you like, the list will get a lot longer. The only thing you have is your perception of how similar those two are in the lexicon. German will have 30% of the lexicon with no statistically significant similarities to English and French 40% so you should be able to find thousands of unpenetrable words in either language if you like.
I never claimed it measures the difficulty of learning a language. All I said is it’s not the lexicon that is so different that similarities are hard to pick out. Your example of haul/holen is just one more example where you mistakenly take differences in spelling as more important as pronunciation. The actual pronunciation ( hôl/hólen) isn’t any more different than is between French/English true cognates. Based on the examples you have given it seems that ignoring -en end in German would get you very close to the English equivalent in many cases. If you can’t see that, you are just holding yourself back. I don’t know how unconventional learning styles have anything to do with the similarities between languages. The fact that they work doesn’t in any way affect linguistical calculations.
There are also studies how words are recognized and not all have to be same, mind fills in the gaps. There are many examples of this and most people find it easy to read.
Calling names doesn’t help much your case. I did say from the start that I’m not trolling, just telling the facts as they are and maybe get you to realize that German isn’t inherently difficult for you. I would say it’s more of a compliment. It’s up to you what you want to do with the knowledge.
Btw. I don’t need a history lesson. I’m very familiar with the history of the area and how these languages have developed. It’s the present that we should be looking at and unless you can find a actual lexical calculation that contradicts what I have said I’m not answering anymore. Good luck with your studies
You have said that English and German have 60% lexical similarity. That is false. Firstly, the figures you give are not for the lexical similarity of two languages, rather they are the lexical similarity of a list of words from each language. Secondly, these studies typically compare a lexicon of about 200 words or less, and they choose words that are commonly used. Unfortunately you give no source for your figures so it is impossible to know the word list size.
The lexical similarity of these lists can give an indication of the genetic relationship of two languages. That the lexical similarity of short lists of words is higher for English and German than for English and French is to be expected as the most common words in English are mostly Germanic, for historical reasons.
The lexical similarity of these lists can tell us absolutely nothing about the difficulty of either language for a native speaker of the other. That is because the word lists are a tiny proportion of the vocabulary of a native speaker (maybe 2% or less). The number of words that are shared by the two languages is a better metric for the difficulty of learning one language when one already knows the other.
You accuse me of rudeness, and yet you attribute to me things I have not said (or you cannot read English), you talk down to me in a patronising manner, and you make empty statements along the lines of “All linguists are agreed that …” in an attempt to intimidate rather than discuss.
You quite obviously do not know the history of the English language since you think that the much younger latinate vocabulary has undergone far more changes than the older Germanic, which is patently false.
And you quite clearly do not understand lexical similarity.
I think the Space Repetition System is really boring and strays from the concept of comprehensible input. Lately, what I do is generate a simplified lesson, taking advantage of the app’s functionality. I regenerate the lesson and paste the original text. Then, I download the audio from the original lesson and use a free program called Audacity. I listen to the lesson, and when I come across a word or phrase that interests me, I copy that section and paste it two or three more times. So in the end, I generate the same audio, but the parts I’m interested in are repeated during a single playback. The Lingq app itself always recognizes the text while playing the audio because there’s no variation in the text.
Also, increasingly, I use the URL of the moment when the new word or phrase of interest appears in the YouTube video, and I paste this URL into the meaning of the word or phrase I’ve created. Each time, I use less translation into my language in the meaning of the word or phrase. I prefer to paste the URL as I mentioned before, at the precise moment of the YouTube video, or to copy and paste the phrase in the target language , from the word or phrase that interests you.
I encountered this problem early on with LingQ. During review, it defaults to auto-incrementing the level of familiarity of you get it correct twice. In lessons, it also auto-adds them to “known” if you page forward without tapping on the blue words.
I turned off both of those settings. Now I control the incrementing of familiarity level based on how confident I feel. Words stay a lot longer in levels 2-3, because I don’t want them going to 4 or known until I know them fully from Eng-Rus and Rus-Eng without hints. Based on this practice, the metric of known words is pretty true to my actual grasp of the new language.
That matches my experience. I’ve recently increased the quantity of CI that I use, I’m hoping that huge amounts of relatively simple German will create and reinforce long term memories. Certainly I am making progress, it feels more comfortable and more natural.
It’s LEXICAL similarity.