Fluent in 3 Months: How Anyone at Any Age Can Learn to Speak Any Language from Anywhere in the World

poder:
to be able, can, may
posso
I can
pode
he/she/it/you/one can
podem
they can
querer:
to want
quero
I want

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quer
he/she/it/you/one want(s)
querem
they want
ter que:
to have to
tenho que
I have to
tem que
he/she/it/you/one has/have to
têm que
they have to
For much more on Portuguese, see fi3m.com/portuguese.
Germanic Languages
A little closer to home, we have the Germanic languages. This is the branch of
the linguistic family on which our own English rests. As such, there are a lot of
things we share in common with German, Dutch, Norwegian, Icelandic,
Danish, Swedish, and Afrikaans.
Unlike English, however, these languages tend to be very much phonetic,
in that the spelling and pronunciation rules (apart from borrowed English
words, which are more common than you think) are consistent. Those rules
may be different than what you are used to, but once you learn them, you can
generally pronounce any word that you see spelled out.
Endless remnants of what German and English have in common crop up
often, and the grammar feels eerily familiar, especially for anyone who has
read Shakespeare. Several hundred years ago, English’s “you” was actually the
plural version of the word that is today’s all-encompassing singular and plural
“you.” “Thou” is not that far off the sound of today’s German and Norwegian
du. And “thine” compares with the German dein. From “thee” we have dich.
Even the conjugation follows the same pattern of “Thou hast,” Du hast.
Keeping this in mind has helped German conjugation feel a little more familiar
to me.
But where these Germanic languages start to make more sense is in their
common vocabulary.
As always, for whatever language you are learning, make sure to find a list
of cognates. In German/Dutch/Swedish, “apple” is Apfel/appel/apple, “arm”
and “April” are both exactly the same in all three languages, “foot” is

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Fuß/voet/fot, and “book” is Buch/boek/bok (in the two latter examples, oe is
the oo sound in Dutch). There are countless others.
In this case, you can actually apply the opposite advice from the Romance
languages section, where I mention considering more formal words in English
to find possible cognates. With these languages, find less formal words—not
slang though, as the words need to be more likely a part of older English. So,
while French and Spanish have entrer and entrar to resemble our “enter,” the
alternative of “come in” also has Germanic equivalents. In German, it’s
(her)einkommen. Rather than use a word like “consider,” if you opt for “think
(about),” you’ll find that denken is “think” in German and Dutch. Generally,
words for parts of the body, many animals, and tools tend to be quite similar or
even exactly the same.
While we certainly have lots in common, Germanic languages are also
slightly more likely than other languages to borrow words from English.
You’ll find these among any lists of cognates.
In German, for instance, Flat Rate is used to describe cell-phone contracts.
There’s also Interview (in the context of a TV or celebrity interview), cool (as
in “great,” not cold temperatures), Jeans, Jetlag, Job, Musical, Party,
Sandwich, Scanner, Toast, Top Ten, unfair, Website, and many others. If the
German word associated with technology or something trendy, it may be
possible to use the English word, but you can confirm this in a list of cognates.
Germanic languages also borrow words from other languages English has
borrowed from, such as Restaurant, Charme, Cousin, Dessert, Hotel,
Omelette, Prinz, Tourist, Zigarette, and many other words from French that are
recognizable even with slight spelling changes, and this also applies to Dutch,
Norwegian, etc.
German
German applies three genders to nouns, (masculine, feminine, and neuter),
which at first can seem totally randomly assigned. Of course, this is not the
case. Although the meaning of the word (apart from any people or animals
associated with that gender) does not contribute so much, it’s the ending of the
word you need to look at, and remember it’s the word that has gender, not the
object. For example,
the endings -ant, -ast, -ich, -ig, -ismus, -ling, -or, -us are masculine,

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-a, -anz, -ei, -enz, -heit, -ie, -ik, -in, -keit, -schaft, -sion, -sis, -tion, -tät, -ung, -
ur are feminine, and
-chen, -icht, -il, -it, -lein, -ma, -ment, -tel, -tum, -um are neuter.
Apart from this, words ending in -el, -er, -en are mostly masculine, those
ending in -t or -e are mostly feminine, and those with the prefix Ge- are
mostly neuter.
This may seem incredibly intimidating, but it’s a small enough list that you
can learn it, and it will cover the vast majority of words you are likely to come
across so that you will know their likely gender as soon as you see or hear
them. This is much more efficient than trying to learn the gender of every
single word individually. There are some exceptions and words not covered by
these descriptions, but whenever you can’t be confident of a word’s gender,
just guess. A one in three chance is fine and it won’t be the end of the world if
you get it wrong. As always, it won’t confuse a German to hear you say der
Auto when it’s actually das Auto. Fix gender issues later in your language
learning story, but keep the previous examples in mind so you have a lot less
work to do to learn those genders.
German grammar can also seem intimidating with all the terminology used
in grammar books, such as accusative, dative, nominative, and genitive, but I
find that learning sentences and seeing how words come up in context makes
grammar much easier to deal with. Certain words follow particular
prepositions all the time, for instance.
These grammatical cases are comparable to how, in English, we
distinguish between “I” and “me,” or “he” and “him.” You use one for the
subject (“I”; ich in German) and one for the object (“me”; mich in German).
German just expands on this to add a new one (mir) in certain situations, but I
never found that people misunderstood me if I got these mixed up when I was
starting to speak German.
Conjugation in German is harder than in English but still less complex than
in the Romance languages. Nearly all the time ich (“I”) has an -e ending, du
(“you”) has an -st ending, “he/she/it” has a -t ending, and “we/they” has an -
en. Even so, to give your sentences more versatility, it’s still very useful to
learn modal verbs first. There are six modal verbs (dürfen, mögen, sollen,
können, müssen, wollen), all of which are irregular, but I got more mileage out
of focusing on the following ones first:

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