Countries where German is an official or dominant language

German has a reputation for difficulty that it only half deserves.

The half it does not deserve is pronunciation. German spelling is close to phonetic: learn the rules once, and a word you can read is a word you can say. There are no silent endings to trip over the way there are in French, and no tones to get wrong the way there are in Mandarin. Your accent will be bad for a while and you will be understood from the first week.

The half it does deserve is grammar, and it is concentrated almost entirely in one place.

The thing that is actually hard

Every German noun has a gender. That gender changes the article in front of it. And the article changes again depending on what job the noun is doing in the sentence.

That is why German can write the same sentence in several word orders without changing the meaning, and it is why a learner who has not internalised the articles cannot read German at speed. The information English puts in word order, German puts in three letters at the front of the noun phrase.

Everything else follows from that. The cases, the adjective endings, the relative pronouns: all of it is the same system seen from different angles. Learn it early, and German becomes fairly gentle. Defer it, and you will spend years being understood without understanding.

What this course is

A hundred words, one chapter, and three grammar guides: the articles, the four cases, and the six modal verbs. That is a deliberate size. It is enough to read simple German sentences and find out whether the language suits you, and it is honest about stopping there.

If it does suit you, our Spanish and French courses run to several thousand words each, and German will grow the same way if the demand is there.

Frequently asked

Frequently asked

Is German hard for English speakers?

Easier than it looks and harder than it sounds. The two languages are cousins, so a great deal of core vocabulary is recognisable once you know the sound shifts: Wasser and water, Buch and book. The difficulty is concentrated in one place, which is that every noun carries a gender and that gender changes the words around it.

How long does it take to learn German?

The US Foreign Service Institute puts German at roughly 750 class hours to professional working proficiency, which is one band above Spanish and French and far below Mandarin or Russian. For a self-teaching adult at half an hour a day, reading simple German comfortably is a matter of months.

What should I learn first in German?

The articles, before any vocabulary at all. Everything else in German grammar hangs off der, die and das, and a learner who defers them spends years guessing. After that the four cases, in the order they actually matter rather than as four equal columns.

Across the German library

Everything on the site for German, in the order you would learn it.

Start here

Core vocabulary

Grammar