Following video by Steve Kaufmann is in my opinion one the best and most important videos he has done about learning languages. It also explains some of how to use the unkown, lingQ and know words.
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Maybe Iâm alone here, but in German I canât learn vocabulary without trying. For ages I found German words not sticking until I made a very determined effort to try, by consciously focussing on words. Just listening and clicking on words was no good.
In French, a language in which I have a much higher level, words can stick after repeated hearing, sometimes at the first listen if I add some context e.g. Google for images relating to the word.
I do have a poor memory, maybe that is the issue.
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I doubt that having a poor memory is the issue. It seems clear that (for you) German and French words are different. I have no knowledge of German, so I canât guess the reason. But French and English share a huge number of word roots, so you can often just âFrenchifyâ a word you already know in English.
There is no reason to assume that what is the âbest methodâ for Steve is the best method for you. I watch Steveâs videos because he expresses ideas very well, and he expresses many good ideas about language learning. He has the âteacherâ skill: figuring out how something works and then explaining it. Many other people (like me) can do something but not explain it to others.
For my own language study, I have to figure out what works for me. My method might be different at different levels, and different for different languages, as well as different from other learners. So I take ideas from anywhere, and I try some of them, but I donât expect them to be right for me.
No, my comment was made assuming the words have no obvious cognates. Thus éternuer, torcher, fracasser, tracasser, patauger, écarquier, entériner and so on are example French words without obvious cognates in English.
As an aside, French does of course share a lot more cognates with English than German, but thatâs not the issue here.
I agree. Unfortunately he, and others, promote their particular method as the best way to learn. Steve Kaufmann promotes Krashenâs model, which claims to have been proven by research. I read as much as I can on linguistics, and I am discovering that Krashenâs model is highly contentious, and key elements are contradicted by other theories of second language acquisition. That is not to say that the other theories are correct, and Krashen is wrong, just that there is not agreement in the academic domain. German is the first foreign language that I have studied from scratch using online tools, and learning how to learn is part of the process. Curiously Iâm converging on similar techniques to those I used at school and evening classes for French.
He is indeed a good communicator and does mention some interesting ideas. He also makes some very valuable points e.g. a lot of work is needed.
According to the table found here the lexical similarity of French and English is 0.27, while for German and English itâs 0.60, so more then twice as high. It is not surprising, imho, as both English and German are germanic languages. Why do people always think that there are so few cognates between those two languages?
@LeifGoodwin If your memory is the issue, shouldnât it affect both languages?
I never spend time with French so I can only guess, but either there is something different in how you came into contact with that language (already learned something in school, more contact in everyday life via music, for example) or there are some other aspects that reduce the hurdle, like grammar or phonetics. The vocabulary on its own cannot be the reason, imho.
In the often refered to data of the US department who trains people to work in other countries embassies, if I am not mistaken, there was already an observation that learning German takes longer then French which takes longer then other germanic or romanic languages. IIRC the average span for germanic and romanic languages was 24 weeks, 30 weeks for French (+25%) and 36 weeks for German (+36%). So you are definetely not the only English person with German.
For me, all works in German as well. But the same text I try to read several times. And on the 3-5 time I can recognize almost all words. It depends on difficulty, of course. If there is about 30% of new words in the text, it works well.
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You are making what I suspect is a common mistake. The lexical similarity of the German and English languages is not 0.60. That figure is in fact derived by comparing very short lists of the most common words, typically 200 words or even fewer. In other words, it is the lexical similarity of two short word lists. The result is taken as a measure of the genetic similarity of two languages, since it is assumed that the most common words are the oldest, and least likely to change over time. Thus bread and Brot, brother and Bruder. That the figure is much higher for English and German than for English and French suggests that English is a Germanic language, and indeed it is classed as a West Germanic language, alongside German, Dutch, Luxemburgish etc.
English is very much a hybrid language, approximately 60% of the vocabulary is derived from Norman French, medieval and modern French and latin. From memory about one third of English words are Germanic in origin.
Also donât forget that Germanic words largely arrived in the sixth century, with some North Germanic words arriving in later centuries. French words arrived post 1066, large numbers of latin words arrived in the renaissance and enlightenment, so the less common words have undergone fewer changes over the years. Words such as bread and cheese are used so often that they are relatively stable.
There are several issues here.
Firstly my French is sufficiently advanced that I can listen to native podcasts. Today while driving to the waste tip, I was listening to a French podcasts on rare illnesses. Thus I get a huge reinforcement from listening for several hours a day to spoken French. I cannot listen to German content.
Secondly, German is so strange to my ear. When I hear Ă©goutter I can guess that it means to drain, as the Ă© prefix signifies removal and une goutte means a drop (water, oil etc). Thus Ă©pouiller, Ă©ventrer, Ă©gorger and so on. Whereas entfernen, schlieĂen and vermeiden are just abstract combinations of syllables.
In defence of German, it was invented by the same person that invented Lego, hence der Teil, der Vorteil, der Nachteil and der Trag, der Vertrag, der Vortrag, der Beitrag etc.
I sometimes laugh out loud when I find a new Lego style word that is very literal e.g. die Untertasse. It is quite charming.
From an evolutionary viewpoint, I am surprised how different it is from latin.
That of course mixes up all components of language learning. French spelling is particularly hard, albeit not as serious a headcase as English, and that makes the language harder than Spanish and Italian. German spelling and pronunciation is simple, the grammar is tricky but regular, but for some of us the vocabulary is tough.
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I am aware of how those lexical similarities are calculated, and that those numbers are to be taken with caution. And increasing the amount of words taken into consideration or shifting the line at which you distinguish between similar or not will alter those numbers, but they would do so for French, too. I can only say from my own experiences in using the English language (I never actively learnt it), that I always considered it super easy to acquire for a german due to its many similarities - not only vocabulary, also grammar and phonetics. Personally I consider Swedish to differ much more from German, although my knowledge of that language is limited, to be honest.
You seem to make a mistake, too, although I cannot say whether it is common: Germanic â German. A lot of our vocabulary is of Latin origin as is our grammar. Stuhl, Fenster, Schule; these are all Latin words - and everyday ones.
The syllable ent also signifies removal. So entleeren for example, which contains the word leer (empty) means to drain. In return, you just demonstrated that French uses the same LEGO principle, as does English or Korean, too, for example. Iâd assume this is the case for almost all languages.
Just out of curiousity, though: What is der Trag? Never heard that before.
Why do you think this is the case? German has lots of Latin words and grammar like grammatical genders, conjugation and declination. Latin has two additional cases and three forms of neuter gender and the pronouns could be dropped like in Spanish. Oh, and they didnât use spaces. But overall there are a lot of similarities.
My point was simple that you are not the only English speaker who finds German to be more difficult to learn then other european languages. I donât think this has something to do with you personally.
In the end you have a higher level in French, so maybe this is the simple reason for your perception. Who knows how you would judge this if you would have started both languages at the same time or with German first.
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And yet you referred to the lexical similarity of the German and English languages.
The most common words in English are usually of Germanic origin. As we go to less often used words, so the latinate content increases dramatically. When we wish to sound educated, we use more latinate words. Technical language is often mostly latinate. I was listening to a French radio podcast on rare illnesses, and could understand countless words I had never before heard because we have almost the same word e.g. infarctus.
English is of course an analytic language. It has almost no case structure, and no grammatical gender. Verb inflections are highly simplified, and the subjunctive tense has also largely disappeared. It has stress based timing, as has German, and we adore diphthongs, as does German. Our two th sounds and r sound might be tricky for Germans. But in essence English is a simplified form of German, with a lot of shared words, and many new words thrown in. I can see that for you English should be relatively easy though I donât know how hard it is for you to learn our word order, as German places verbs in very different locations. For me German is a case of âletâs play hunt the verb, where have they shoved it this time, oh, I didnât expect that, well that is novel, clever themâ.
I formed my opinion by looking at real German texts. I can go to the Le Monde and die Zeitung web sites, for example, click on a big news story, and it would be easy for an English person with beginner level French to figure out the basic story. For German I usually have little idea of the story, even after 18 months studying the language.
To my eye I would not say that a significant proportion of your vocabulary is latinate, even if it is. Thus a lot of the latinate words in German are disguised or unknown to us. Thus StraĂe comes from latin, and bieten comes from old French, though I would never have guessed. As for Fenster, that doesnât exist in English, though we do have defenestrate.
Yes but as I clearly stated, I am far more advanced in French so I am starting to make these connections. I cannot do that in German. For example I had not heard of the word leer before.
Well yes ultimately all languages use Lego principles. I think part of what I am seeing is that French and English tend to borrow Greek and Latin words for new concepts, such as science, oxygen and nitrogen, and the etymology is hidden, unless one knows Greek and latin, whereas German seems to like to coin its own words, thus Wissenshaft, Sauerstoff and Stickstoff. So yes the English words are Lego-ed together, but itâs hidden better.
Interestingly I did realise that the French for saucer, soucoupe, is derived in the same manner as Untertasse, which I had never noticed before.
That is due to my ignorance of German. tragen, vertragen and vortragen exist, I assumed Trag did by analogy with Vertrag and Vortrag. Mea culpa.
I should have been clearer. I am surprised how different German vocabulary is from latin. Both German and latin create words from components, but the components seem quite different. And yet the languages share a common ancestry.
There are of course many words where the ancestry can be traced and explained through sound changes. So in these cases the evolution is clear.
A significant proportion of German vocabulary, 30% from memory, is not Indo European, or at least no Indo-European connection has been found. There are incidentally other Germanic features not found in other IE languages suggesting that they have a non IE origin. Separable verbs is one example.
But then there are words such as der Gang, der Eingang and der Ausgang in German, whereas similar words in French are le couloir, lâentrĂ©e and la sortie. These seem to be basic concepts but constructed quite differently. Then there are the verbs tragen, vertragen and vortragen. French has the corresponding concepts, but again constructed quite differently. Thus French and German have quite different constructions for basic concepts despite a shared IE ancestry. I have read that the separable verbs are not of IE origin, which explains some of this.
I find this curious. I havenât studied the evolution in detail, so someone more knowledgeable might have quite good explanations for this.
Hopefully the above is intelligible.
Except that my difficulty is remembering vocabulary, and not the grammar which many find hard. Though I seem to have found a way to surmount this problem, which does not involve the method described in the video.
As I said, it is part of the reason. But I do find German words harder to learn.
To support the point that the similarities between both languages are high. Not for the sake of the number. Maybe the number is too high, maybe French is even closer to English then German. I donât know, I donât speak French. But I speak German, and a tiny bit of English. They are indeed very similar.
That is exactly the same in German (der Infarkt). And I can heavely rely to what you wrote in regards to French. I can understand Spanish news articles, especially those that deal with science or technology. But I donât understand anything related to everyday life.
Thatâs the point I was trying to make.
Word order isnât a problem. Syntax in general, including non-european languages, isnât something I consider an issue. I just adopt to it. I think people are a bit to obsessed about it, but maybe thatâs subjective. In regards to German you are wrong, though. In main clauses the word order is exactly the same as in English. In subclauses the verb is always on the last position. The leading theory seems to be that the reason is to be able to differentiate main and subclauses, as some connecting words, like dass sound the same like other words (in this case das). To be able to identify the exact meaning of those words you need this kind of differentiation.
EDIT: I am referring mainly to the position of the verb here. In questions the partizip is placed at the end, too. However, the main point is that this isnât random. It partially differs from English, but itâs following a strict rule.
I didnât know that StraĂe originated from Latin. Fenster comes from fenestra. window is similar to the Spanish ventana and should originate from ventilare. I donât know if you can see the similarity between the English and the Spanish word, but it has similarly disguised 
That they are harder to recognize in German might also come from the conjucation and declination, causing you to always see words in different form.
The only reference I could found regarding this statement is the substrate theory, which has been rejected. If you have any other source, Iâd be interested to see it. At such a high percentage I think I should have noticed the difference to English or Spanish.
EDIT: On further looking into it, the aforementioned substrate theory doesnât state German to have 30% vocabulary of non IE origin, but the Germanic languages. (Iâve overlooked that, too, on first sight).
From what I could find seperable words exist in ancient Greek, Latin, Russian and Hungarian. And in almost all Germanic languages.
And the Indoeuropean language is more of a theoretical concept. It seems to be that the current opinion is that itâs more likely that the people back than spoke different languages, but had a lot of contact to each other. Due to this exchange the languages shared a lot of similarities. Itâs similar to todays similarities in european languages that have to do with history: the Roman empire, christianity, the huge amount of migration in the first millenium.
Try scientific stuff. Maybe it is easier to read (like I experience it in Spanish).
I didnât meant to tell you you have to, yet. I just wanted to state that the principle exists in German, too. Of course one need to have acquired some vocabulary before being able to recognice such structures.
German does that, too. Of course, some words like the ones you mention are not of Latin origin. But the majority of scientific terms are. Itâs as in English. The more advanced the topic the higher the percentage of Latin and Greek words is. It seems to be true, though, that the percentage of Latin words in German is lower then in English, whereas at the same time there are quiet some words that originated from English (one source Iâve found said one fourth!). In the end it probably depends on what kind of topics one is most interested in.
Well, I should have mentioned that we have the word die Trage (something to carry wounded persons). Mea culpa etiam.
Except it does no such thing. A comparison of two lists of 200 (or less) of the most common words tells us almost nothing about the similarities between two languages. If we assume most native English speakers know 20,000 words, that means that the list contains 1 % of the words they know.
Your English seems to be at a very high level. Well French is far closer to English than German, it feels to me almost like a dialect: similar word order, simple grammar albeit with grammatical gender and very similar vocabulary. Both underwent a transition to an analytic language which perhaps explains a lot of the similarities. Some say the Norman invaders caused this in English, but I am not convinced.
As I mentioned earlier, when I look at example online news stories, German ones are not readable, but French ones are such that a beginner in French would get the gist due to so many obviously cognate words such as article, problem, avancer, arme, bombe, expliquer, and so on. I see that with basic learner podcasts in German, I struggle.
All I can say is that I donât relate to that when trying to read German. Even allowing for the different spelling conventions.
Ich reise in der Stadt - I travel in the city.
Heute reise ich in der Stadt. - Today I travel in the city.
Ich glaube, dass du in der Stadt lebst. - I believe that you live in the city.
Ich bin in der Stadt angekommen. - I have arrived in the city.
Ich kann sie wachsen sehen - I can see them grow(ing).
Thus the verb position is quite different from English and indeed German is classed as a verb second language. Regarding the example sentences above, I canât figure out the last one. Why does sehen go to the end?
You tell me I am wrong, then you explain why I am right.
I am allowing for spelling and conjugation differences, thus Ich reagiere is clearly using a latinate verb.
The substrate theory has not been rejected, it is though contentious and not accepted by most linguists. Much like so much archaeolinguistics.
You are correct, I had missed that. Thus the proportion in modern German will be substantially less.
You are correct, Hungarian has phrasal verbs where the particle can more around. Russian does not have phrasal verbs. (I know I wrote separable verbs, phrasal verbs is the correct term.)
One would assume that they started out with one tribe, which diverged into groups, then dialects emerged, then distinct languages. 200 years ago half of France spoke a language that was close to Catalan, which in turn is much closer to Italian and Spanish than French. The latin dialect in northern France underwent considerable changes due to influence from Germanic tribes. That is why it sounds so different.
I will get a better idea of the differences as my German improves. They say it starts hard, but gets easier, whereas French is supposed to be the opposite. I actually consider French relatively easy.
Standarized base word lists with 100-200 words exist, that is correct, and they are sometimes used for simple observations. But modern studies also make use of large datasets collected from newspapers, wikipedia, social media platforms, subtitle datasets and so on.
For example, the study
GĂĄbor Bella, Khuyagbaatar Batsuren, and Fausto Giunchiglia. A Database and Visualization of the Similarity of Contemporary Lexicons
uses a dataset of over 8 million cognate pairs. And while their calculated similarity between French and English is almost twice as high as between English and German, the latter is still higher then between English and Danish or Swedish for example, even though not extremely. Spanish is similar to French and Italian somewhere in between those and German. The calculated numbers are relatively low (French is slightly above 8%), so they are rather strict. And even though you are right that in regards to the vocabulary French is propably easier, my point that German is still relatively close to English stands. After the Romance languages the Germanic ones are the ones closest to English.
As stated in my edit, I was refering to the verb position (more precisely, the predicate). Other parts of the sentence follow different rules. But they are uniform nevertheless.
First of all, in the last two sentences you didnât hilight the predicate, but the partizip, in bold letters. You did it cursive in the second last sentence. So itâs
Ich bin in der Stadt angekommen - I have arrived in the city.
Ich kann sie wachsen sehen - I can see them growing.
So as you can see, the predicate is at the same position both in German and English. The difference is that in German the partizip moves to the end of the sentence.
In the first two sentences, the position of the predicate is essentially the same, it follows directly after the subject. The difference in the second sentence is, that in English temporal expressions are either at the beginning or the end of the sentence. So it could also be
I travel in the city today.
and that while in German the temporal expression can also stand at the beginning, in that case the subject shifts behind the predicate. It does not so if you put the temporal expression on a different position which is, unlike in English, not at the end but after the predicate
Ich reise heute in der Stadt.
Off topic but Iâd like to add that this is a strange sentence, semantical wise. The word reisen usually refers to long distances, so between cities or countries. Better translations of the English sentence would be
Ich bummle heute durch die Stadt.
Ich gehe heute durch die Stadt spazieren.
The third sentence demonstrates the difference between main and sub clause.
âŠ, dass du in der Stadt lebst.
is a sub clause, which in this case functions as the object of the main clause.
(Btw.: If anything I write in regards to English grammar is wrong, feel free to correct me.)
In German the differentiation between main and subclause is important. Maybe that is one of the reasons why I donât consider different syntaxes in a different language a problem. My brain is already used to varying orders depending on grammatical function. At this point I would repeat what I have written in another discussion. Some languages require more dedication to the grammar. In regards to German I highly doubt that grammar can best be understood by comprehension. Studying the basics is most likely a good way to ease your pain 
As said I was a bit unclear and unprecise. I hope the above made it more clear.
However, I didnât say that you are âwrongâ. Just that it isnât as random as it may seem and that at least partially there are similarities in syntax between both languages. German has a bit more freedom as it isnât as analytical a language as English is and we make some use of this in longer sentences depending on what we want the stress. But especially the majority of everyday language doesnât consist out of superlong sentences.
Exactly as are restaurieren, funktionieren, sanktionieren, eliminieren, manipulieren, isolieren, relativieren, gestikulieren, minimierenâŠ.
(However, ich isnât written with capital I, we donât take ourselves sooooo serious 
).
rejected is probably not the word used for not accepted by most linguists than. The arguments against the theory are pretty convincing, though.
Why so? There are theories that humankind could have developed independently in Africa and Central Asia. And humans were likely speaking before the epoch we are talking about (5,000-4,000 B.C., as I read it). So before the hypothetical indoeuropean language shall have evolved mankind were already speaking for a while (the numbers vary strongly, as to be expected, but 100,000 years seems to be a good average) and have already far spread. Of course it could be that one tribe was more successful then the other ones and conquered them, similar to how the Romans did it. But that is hypothetical.
A uniform German language started to develop based on the Bible translation of Martin Luther. Before that, the differences in local dialects were pretty strong and Low German (spoken in the north) and High German (spoken in the south) was almost unintelligable to each other. I think such unifications of the language can also be found in other languages, as they are mainly a result of geographical separation. With the world growing together and English as world wide lingua franca I would assume this to intensify even more. I wouldnât be surprised if the lingual variety several thousand years ago would have been higher then today. But that is really just an assumption.
Then I have no clue why German vocab is harder for you than French vocab,
True. Worse, some of this discussion is about teachers teaching students, so itâs not clear how much applies to self-directed study.
My French is quite advanced, so I can listen to native content, and learn relatively quickly. When I hear new words, the consituent sounds are not new, the word structure is familiar, there are often clues in the word structure, and I can play around with sentences containing a new word. Thus I can quickly familiarise myself with new words.
My German is basic, words still look clunky and alien. The comprehensible input approach just wasnât working. However, recently I have decided to spend more time focussing on learning words, less time on so called comprehensible input, and they are starting to sink in.
And interestingly each polyglot seems to have their own individual approach. One or two try to convince us that we should use their method as it is the ânaturalâ one. I am starting to think that each person needs to find the method that works for them.
That all sounds very reasonable.
I am totally lost. The point I was making, with a little hyperbole thrown in for humour, is that German verb order is very different from English. It is regular, so not hard to learn. However, that last example sentence still makes no sense to me.
Ich kann sie wachsen sehen - I can see them grow(ing).
The verb sehen has gone walkabout, and it makes absolutely no sense to me. The same is true here:
Ich kann sie Englisch sprechen lehren. - I can teach them to speak English.
Iâm not surprised, I have a very low level of German.
I donât find German grammar painful, but I do seem to have a poor memory, and it is slow to sink in. Some aspects are starting to become automatic, it just needs more time. It will progress faster once I can listen to more complex input.
What strikes me is that English and French âfeelâ very similar, whereas German is just very different. Maybe that feeling will disappear as I become more proficient.
As ever, it depends on who you read. I read John McWhorterâs book on the English language, and he doesnât claim it to be true, but rather points out some interesting features of Germanic languages that suggest that there might be a semitic substrate. The presence of words like come and came is one example i.e. an internal vowel change to denote past tense. Early semitic languages had the same word feature, only later developing multiple internal vowel changes to indicate differences in meaning.
I probably should have been clearer that when I referred to one tribe, I meant one tribe speaking a form of proto Indo European. Clearly there would have been numerous groups of humans speaking different languages, spread around the world, at least at that time.
From my reading of the literature, the PIE speakers were a farming community that spread west into what is today northern and western europe. DNA studies suggest that in Britain there is a significant pre PIE substrate, suggesting that the celtic tribes moved into Britain and assimilated the local hunter gatherers rather than displacing them, or killing them.
Incidentally, Homo erectus was able to cross large expanses of water, requiring the construction of sophisticated boats. That suggests a high degree of organisation and learning, which requires the use of language. Thus Homo erectus was capable of speech, and hence speech dates back a million years or more. Wikipedia contradicts some of this, but Iâve learnt that Wikipedia is not a trusted source, as it favours certain political and scientific ideas over others.
I believe that linguists would say that there was a much greater variation in the past. France was full of distinct languages and dialects, most are dead or dying. Many north, central and south american languages are dead or dying.
You need to differentiate between the predicate and the participle. The predicate (so the actual verb in regards to word order) is can, not see or teach. The latter are the participles. Itâs the same as in
I have arrived
have is the predicate, so the V in SVO. arrived is the participle. The difference to English is that the object (for example âin the cityâ) isnât added after the participle, but directly after the predicate, shifting the participle to the end of the sentence.
Sorry for the terminology, but as both are verbs it is hard to differentiate them otherwise.
I had no means to criticize you. I thought that you may found that sentence in an old book.
Maybe there isnât one aspect between those languages that connects them stronger, but several tiny things that sum up. More common words; maybe a similar syntax, pronounciation and more prominence of French in English speaking media, too? I would say that the last aspect is at least something that makes English the easiest language to learn for Germans. Turn on the radio and every second song you hear is in English. I donât know how much German english natives get to hear in everyday life.
Irregular Spanish verbs tend to do this, too. Although overall they change even more dramatically.
sirvo â servĂ // I serve â I served
duermo â dormi // I sleep â I slept
You can also find this feature in Polish, for example.
I wanted to keep the number low as I havenât really spent a lot of time with the topic yet. Maybe I should have written âat leastâ.
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Thank you. but I donât understand this. It might become clear as I see it more often. Most things do. I am not strong on grammar explanations, but in French I have no issues understanding it in practice,
I would argue that that is not comparable because the primary change is the suffix and one could argue that the root vowel changes for phoetic reasons associated with the suffix e.g. ease of pronunciation.
With come/came, run/ran, rise/rose and so on, it is obvious that the only marker of past tense is the root vowel change.
That said, the strong verbs are just one part of the semitic substratum model, along with vocabulary from an unknown source and other oddities. The model might be nonsense of course.
I cannot comment as I know no Polish.
Me neither. I googled irregular verb conjugation tables. I just wanted to bring up an example from a different language family in addition to the Romance one.
However, I am not completely sold by your suffix argument, especially as the suffix in come and rose is silent. And that it is for phonetic reasons is pure speculation; why should sirvĂ be harder to pronounce then servĂ?
And even if this would be a predominantly Germanic language feature, it could be just that. I mean, I would expect different language families to have unique features to them to some degree.
In regards to vocabulary. For quiet some words similar forms have been found over the time. It is odd, too, that there is quiet some military associated vocabulary on that list of âodd wordsâ, although in that model the Germanic tribes were superior to the semitic ones military wise. Why should the winning faction of a military conflict use military vocabulary of the defeated ones? Itâs as if the allies would have started to call their tanks âpanzerâ after WWII. And words change over time. That it isnât possible to trace back the roots of every single word is not really surprising, especially as assuming common ground for most european language is mainly based on the hypothesis of an indoeuropean language, which is unproven.
I wouldnât reject that there are words of semitic origin in the Germanic language. But to that extent as suggested by the semitic substratum model doesnât seem convincing. And another question would be why, considering how much time has passed, those words didnât partially made their way into other language families?
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That is reasonable, since âpartizipâ is not a word in English. In English grammar, âhave arrivedâ is the present perfect tense of the verb âto arriveâ. English has âhelper wordsâ like âhaveâ and âhadâ and âhasâ which are part of some verbs. Some other European languages use similar words in a similar way.
The term âpartizipâ is jargon in the field of linguistics. So any comment using the word is part of some linguistic analysis. If you are not a linguist, and have not studied the subject, then you will not understand linguistic jargon.
Itâs participle. I was a bit too lazy to look it up as I thought they are so similar it shouldnât be an issue. It is no linguistic jargon, though. (I am no linguist).
Both the german and english term were heavely used in school. It would be odd that the term has never been heard of before considering how much native English speakers tend to complain on how grammar intensive their language subjects were in school. 
EDIT: From a textbook for language learners. Judging from the layout it is not meant for linguists
EDIT: Btw., I explicitely stated that I needed the two terms for differentiation, as both words I am refering to are verbs. I could also have called them Tinky Winky and Dipsy for that matter. The naming isnât important for the explanation.