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Many language students from English speaking countries want to learn German but find it difficult when they are faced with the obstacles of German grammar and the overwhelming vocabulary. The German language is not easy to learn but it definitely is a very fascinating one. Especially if you are a native English speaker you will recognize some similarities and find many clues that both the German and English language actually belong to the same family.

What many people don't know is that actually German is the language most similar to English - more than any other language. This is because English and German both belong to the same family of languages: The Germanic Languages. In Europe three language families dominate: Germanic, Romanic and Slavic.

It is interesting that in Northern Germany - located closer to England than the southern part - the dialect versions of certain expressions get quite similar to English.

This may be one of the reasons why there are many sites written in English doing a fantastic job teaching the German language. These sites can use examples from English that people can easily recognize and then use them to better understand the respective German version of the expression.

Something that makes it quite complicated for many people to learn German is that most tutorials are too complicated and boring. This is why students of the German Language prefer to turn to online tutorials to start learning the language.

There are many tutorials out there that provide illustrated examples or audio tutorials. The drawback of text books is always that they are exactly what their name suggests: Books with text. But to truly learn a language people want to hear and speak it. This is why any type of multimedia tutorial is perfect for beginners.

If you want to find a German language lesson you can easily find some examples on the Internet. However, most free lessons turn out to be just a trial version or the first chapter of a paid program or an expensive product.

If you are more interested in complete free German tutorials - check out this list of free German tutorials.

Although it is a good advice to use music for learning English - do not use music and song lyrics to learn German. Many songs contain either a form of dialect, inappropriate slang or rude language. Too many songs twist the language around and are not good examples of German grammar. Some use very old-fashioned and poetry-style language. So don't use it.

Do not read German newspapers. Most of them are usually political and use a terminology which is extremely hard to understand. Phrases are extremely long, so usually when you get to the end you cannot remember what the beginning was. Newspapers are more suitable for the advanced language learner. So please stay away from them when you start out.