- The German language is the official language in Germany, Austria and Lichtenstein and one of the official languages in Switzerland, Luxembourg and Italian province of south Tyrol. It is the most widely spoken language in the European Union – ahead of French, Spanish and even English. German ranks 11th in the list of the most widely spoken languages in the world. German is a language to almost 100 million people worldwide and is spoken by a total of over 130 million people
- German is the third most commonly taught language worldwide. German edges out Mandarin Chinese, Russian, and Spanish, landing in third place among the most widely taught languages. This places German right after English and French.
- The German alphabet has 26 letters just like the English language, but it has three umlauted (letters with two dots on top) letters, ä, ö, ü as well as a ligature, ß that is called ein scharfes (sharp S or double S). It is a peculiar letter. If you use double S for ‘Masse‘ when you do not have a German keyboard, it translates to mass. But if you write Maße, it refers to dimensions.
- Time in German is counted with respect to the next hour, rather than the previous one. If a German tells you that it is halb vier (“half four”), you might assume that it’s 4:30. However, you’d be wrong: in German, you report time by counting the minutes to the next hour, so “half four” means that it’s half an hour until four: in other words, it’s 3:30.
- Do you know that German Nouns have three genders? In German, all nouns are either masculine, feminine or neutral. In English, we call things – for example, chair, lamp, car, banana – “it”, but in German, even words for things have a gender. It is important to know that the gender of German nouns rarely relates to the sex of the person or thing it refers to. For example, in German the word for “man” is masculine, but the word for a “girl” is neuter and the word for “person” is feminine.
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