German for everyone!

So, German is one of the newer Tongues in Town, with its "hard" vocals most people think about it as harsh and well, hard. Its true that german has a lot of consonants, but germans mostly think of it as the "language of the poet and the thinker" (Die Sprache des Dichters und Denkers)

In my time at the university (i´ll add here that i study germanistic lingustic) i´ve come over some interessting points wich both made me realize that most people dont know how german really works AND that its not that different from other languages! So i´ll try to fill you in, with the hope, that it will make you feel more at home!

Simply put, yes, you can think of it like this. I´ll try and convey this to you in the easiest way, i can explain. All languages can be traced back to a PROTOlanguage, in most cases* its a protolanguage called "indogermanic" (wich basically means LANGUAGE OF THE MIDDLE/EUROPE)

*:

From there its splitting into different countrys and therefore different developments (Immigration, Decomposion of countrys and many other factures are kicking in there). So for starters, i´ll make a Sprachbaum (kinda a language family-tree) wich is a theorie common since the 19th century:

                      - celtic ---(Irish Gaelic, Breton)
                    /                                          -- Old English - English (today!)
                   /                                         /
indogermanic   - germanic  - Westgermanic - Upper German -- German (today!)
                   \                  \
                    \                   - Old Norse - Swedish, Norwegian
                      - italic -romance ---- Romanian, Romansh, Italian, French, Spanish

Disklaimer for this Chart:

So, as you can see now (i hope) English and German part very late, this is why there are many similarities in the vocabulary of those two languages. In terms of linguistics (the sience of languages you could say) these two are closly relaited, so close that they often refer to each other to explain certain processes during their evolution and their native history.
But there is one last thing to consider, before i can start. And that is: well there IS a difference.

The main difference is obviously that these are two different countrys, and they are big enough to have gotten different spoken sytles in themselfes. This is a phenomenon wich i will not discuss here.
The main difference wich parts english from german, and german overall from other laguages SEVERLY is that is had multiples "phonetic shifts".

Phonetic Shifts:

In german, you count in a System similiar to french.You only have to learn the first numbers ( 0 to 20) after that only those who indicate decadics.

Example:
two - zwei | three - drei | twenty - zwanzig | and - UND

twentytwo - zweiundzwanzig
twentytwo - dreiundzwanzig
Its basically saying "twenty and two" but reversed (you could put it that way: its the little fry that makes the difference )

"Es ist zweiundzwanzig Uhr." means therefore "It is twentytwo o'clock." (have to rework that sentence....)