German Language Courses

Like learning any foreign language, learning German takes practice, patience, and willingness to try something new. There are a few things that German has in common with other world languages. For example, all nouns in German have genders. Learning a new noun in German means learning the word’s gender too. Sometimes, this makes sense — words like “woman,” “boy,” and “queen” have exactly the genders you would expect. But other words like “potato” and “table” have genders too. Like many other world languages, German also uses grammatical cases. An example of a grammatical case is “I” and “me” in English. Finally, people who already know some English may recognize many common German words. Words like “kommen” (to come) and “senden” (to send) are examples. Some German words even come directly from modern English, such as “computer,” “baby,” and “camping.”

Most German speakers are in Western and Central Europe. In fact, German is the most widely spoken native language in the European Union with over 95 million native speakers. Today, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland are the three countries with the largest number of German speakers. German is also an official language in Belgium, Luxembourg, and Liechtenstein. In Central European countries such as Hungary and the Czech Republic, many people learn German as a second language. This is because the Austrian Empire once covered much of Central Europe and the Balkans. Outside of Europe, some religious Amish and Mennonite communities in the United States still speak German just as their ancestors did when they arrived from Germany many generations ago. And many Jews around the world speak Yiddish, a variant of German that also includes elements of Hebrew and Slavic languages.

German is an Indo-European language, a family of over 400 languages that also includes English, Hindi, Russian, Spanish, Greek, and Persian. Early German can be traced back to a language called Proto-Germanic (here, “proto” means “first” or “early,” like in “prototype”). Proto-Germanic is considered to be the common ancestor language to all modern Germanic languages, which include English, Dutch, Danish, and Swedish. Over time, Proto-Germanic split into several varieties. German, English, and Dutch all came from the variety known as West Germanic. In the parts of Europe that now include Germany and Austria, West Germanic evolved into Old High German. After many centuries, Old High German changed into the modern German of today. Throughout history, German speakers also adopted words from other languages such as French, church Latin, and, today, modern English.