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Many people want to learn German but when asked tell us it is extremely complicated when they are faced with the obstacles of learning German grammar and the sometimes confusing vocabulary. The German language might not be the easiest one to learn but it definitely is a very fascinating one. Particularly when you are a native English speaker you might find a great deal of similarities and find many clues that these two languages 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.

A fascinating fact is that in Northern Germany - located closer to England than the southern part - the dialect versions of particular expressions get very similar to English.

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

Something that makes it hard for certain people to learn German is that most tutorials are too complicated and boring. This is why students of the German Language like 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 we need to hear and speak the language. 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 net. However, most free lessons turn out to be just a trial version or the first part of a paid program or an expensive product.

If you are more interested in complete free German tutorials - check out this list of 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 play with language by falsifying it and twisting it around. 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. The sentences are extremely long, so usually when you get to the end you cannot remember how it started. Newspapers are more suitable for the advanced language learner. So please stay away from them in the beginning.