Comparing German and English

If English is your mother tongue, then that makes German your uncle tongue.

But when English speakers are learning German, it seems like we’re all too quick to focus on the elements of our new language that seem foreign, obtuse, archaic and totally difficult to learn.

Yet English and German are recently descended from the same root language, Proto-Germanic, which was spoken for thousands of years as one tongue. It was only in the last 500 years or so that the two languages diverged to their present forms.