Guten Tag (G’day)

Standard German is known today simply as “Hochdeutsch” (High German), and this is used almost always for written German. Books and newspapers are printed in  standard German. “Hochdeutsch” is spoken by educated speakers everywhere; however, regional variants exist in the spoken language, for example, Swiss German in the majority of Switzerland.

German is part of the West Germanic group of languages within the Indo-European language family and is a close relative of English.

Some interesting facts about German:

– As is the case in many foreign languages, all nouns in German have a specific gender. German is different to  a lot of the Latin languages though, in that it has not 2 but 3 genders – in addition to ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ it also has ‘neuter’.

• der – masculine
• die – feminine
• das – neuter

– Today German is spoken by more than 100 million people worldwide.

– It is spoken in Germany, Austria, a large part of Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, the South  Tyrol region of Italy, the Opole Voivodship of Poland, parts of Belgium, parts of Romania and the Alsace region of France. Several former German colonies, such as Namibia, also have remaining pockets of German speakers.

– Following the American Wars of Independence, the Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia and considered adopting a new language for the future of the United States. When it came to the vote, English was chosen above German as the language of the new republic – reputedly only by one vote!

-The first printed book in the world was in German. Johannes Gutenberg invented book printing and printed the first book in the world – a 42-page bible – in 1455. Martin Luther had  translated the Bible from Latin into German to make it available to common people – who could not read Latin – that language of the Church.

– German is often considered to be one of the most important cultural languages worldwide. Many  famous musicians and scientists like Freud, Beethoven, Goethe, Mozart and Einstein wrote and spoke in German.

-German is the third most commonly taught foreign language worldwide.

As you can see, German is definitely a useful language to have in your repertoire. Due to its similarity to some English words, you will find that you can understand bits and pieces of a text straight away, even though they might be spelt and pronounced slightly differently. So, come and find out more about the German language and book yourself in for a German class at Sydney Language Solutions.

Bis Bald!

Danny Ruch – German Language Instructor