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🇬🇧 → 🇩🇪

How easy is German for English speakers?

Going from English to German (Deutsch) has a composite linguistic distance of 34% (curated lexical data). Below is the dimension-by-dimension breakdown.

34% distance FSI Cat II — ~900 hours
Lexical similarity
60%

Shared vocabulary, cognates, and loanwords.

Grammatical distance
58%

Morphology, syntax, word order, cases.

Phonological similarity
0%

Shared sounds and phoneme inventory.

Writing-system match
100%

Latin → Latin

Genealogical kinship
100%

Indo-European ↔ Indo-European

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Sample sentences side-by-side

How everyday sentences look in both languages:

🇬🇧 English
My brother and sister live in the old house near the water.
🇩🇪 German
Mein Bruder und meine Schwester leben in dem alten Haus nahe dem Wasser.
🇬🇧 English
The winter wind is cold and the night is long and dark.
🇩🇪 German
Der Winterwind ist kalt und die Nacht ist lang und dunkel.

Curated cognates between English and German

Word pairs that share a common etymological root — instantly recognisable across both languages:

Other easy languages for English speakers

The 5 languages with the lowest linguistic distance from English:

Think you can tell them apart?

A quick 3-question check between English and German. No signup.