100 German Words English Speakers Already Know
English and German are sister languages — and that means you already know more German than you think.
If you speak English, you have a massive head start in German. The two languages descend from the same Proto-Germanic ancestor, which means thousands of words look and sound nearly identical. Linguists call these "cognates."
GerLan is built around this insight: we start every learner with words they already know, so you can read real German from day one.
Perfect Cognates (Identical or Near-Identical)
These words are spelled the same or almost the same and mean exactly what you think:
- 1Arm → arm
- 2Hand → hand
- 3Finger → finger
- 4Name → name
- 5Ball → ball
- 6Garten → garden
- 7Winter → winter
- 8Sommer → summer
- 9Wind → wind
- 10Wasser → water
- 11Fisch → fish
- 12Maus → mouse
- 13Haus → house
- 14Buch → book
- 15Gold → gold
The Sound-Shift Patterns
Once you learn a few sound shifts, you can decode hundreds more words. German "ch" often maps to English "gh" or "k": Nacht/night, Buch/book. German "z" maps to English "t": zwei/two, zehn/ten.
These patterns mean you do not memorize words one by one — you learn a system that unlocks whole families of vocabulary.
Start Reading Today
With just cognates, you can already read a simple German sentence: "Mein Bruder hat eine Hand und einen Arm." You understood that — congratulations, you are reading German.
Ready to go further? GerLan turns this head start into fluency with spaced repetition, native audio, and gamified lessons — all free for A1 and A2.