German-English Cognates Posted by Constanze on Oct 25, 2017 in Language, Uncategorized
Guten Tag! In a recent post, Six Reasons To Learn German, I mentioned that German and English are from the same language family – the Indo-European family – which means both languages have taken words from Latin, Greek and French. Because of this, there are numerous cognates (words sharing a common source) that look and sound similar in both languages. This may be useful to remember on those days when German seems like the hardest language in the world to learn; these familiar words work as ‘helpers’ that help you understand a text, for instance, when you’ve no clue what the text is about! So what I’ve done is collected a load of German cognates to share with you here. Some are ‘perfect cognates’ (exactly the same) while others are ‘near cognates’ (similar).
German English
die Adresse address
der Arm arm
der Gott God
das Haar/die Haare hair
haben to have (ich habe = I have)
halb half
die Hand hand
das Haus house
hungrig hungry
ich I
der Kaffee coffee
die Kamera camera
die Klinik clinic
lang long
der Mann man
der Moment moment
die Mutter mother
das Papier paper
die Pause breaktime/pause
perfekt perfect
die Polizei police
das Restaurant restaurant
das Schiff ship
der Schuh/die Schuhe shoe/shoes
der Supermarkt supermarket
der Tiger tiger
die Universität university
der Vater father
das Wasser water
das Wetter weather
der Wind wind
wild wild
das Wort word
German coffee shop named ‘Kaffeepause’. You could probably guess what this place is without knowing any German at all. Photo by kefraya on flickr.com under a CC license (CC BY-ND 2.0)
Other cognates include all of the months of the year (Januar, Februar, März, April, Mai, Juni, Juli, August, September, Oktober, November, Dezember), some of the days of the week (Montag, Freitag, Sonntag), the planets & outer space (click here for the blog post), and some of the colours (braun, blau, grün, orange).
One thing to note, however, is that German contains many ‘false friends’ – words which you recognise as English, but which have a completely different meaning in German. One example is the word bald, which in English means to have no hair, but in German means soon. The best thing to do is to get to know these false friends so you don’t fall into their trap! Read more on them here, here and here.
Can you think of any more German/English cognates?
I hope your day is fantastisch! Bis bald.
Constanze
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About the Author: Constanze
Servus! I'm Constanze and I live in the UK. I'm half English and half German, and have been writing about German language and culture on this blog since 2014. I am also a fitness instructor & personal trainer.
Comments:
Tom Dawkes:
Always a pleasure to read this and the other language blogs … but as ever there are faux amis. Contrast ‘der Arm ‘ — “of course, it means ‘arm'” with ‘ich bin arm’, meaning’I am poor’
Constanze:
@Tom Dawkes Oh yes, that’s true! Good point!
Allan Mahnke:
Your use of ‘bald’ made me smile remembering a childhood incident. While helping her young son (me) to learn new German vocabulary, my mother warned: Soon you will be ‘bald.’
Henry Patterson:
You should do a blog on the “false friends” you mention here. Enjoying your posts by the way! Thanks.
Constanze:
@Henry Patterson Hey Henry, I linked to three posts about false friends – they’re at the end of the post. Glad you enjoy the blog!
Kevin Kuehlwein:
Looks like some English crept in here.
Pretty sure that the German is “Adresse,” not “Addresse.”
I remember how weird-looking it was when I first encountered it.