"Birds of a feather..." or The power of cognates

Your language teacher in school, like mine, probably told you about "false friends" between your mother-tongue and the language you were studying. Linguists called these words

"cognates".

For myself, the "false friends" turned out to be "good friends". When my students study with me I remember how a child acquires their first language: By making mistakes, adjusting for their mistakes, understanding contexts better and better and developing a better and better feel for the language.

For adult learners, cognates are low-hanging fruit: Most words look the same, sound the same and people used them in similar contexts. The more of these cognates you apply, the more quickly you will learn. Very often you will be correct, sometimes you will be wrong - and that is exactly when you learn.

The power of patterns

Between English and German there are hundreds of cognates

• Nouns

• Verbs : especially lots of irregular words sound very much the same ( English: begin - began-- begun , German: beginnen- begann- begonnen

• Tenses

One very young ( 22 year-old) student of mine always says that he is to lazy to study, but that he aces at recognising patterns. Once we uncover these patterns, you yourself will speed up your learning.