[yurishimo]

I've heard this before and literally every time I hear it my mind is blown.

As a native English speaker, I cannot see any similar patterns between German in English when I happen across random conversations on a site like Reddit in German. But looking at romance languages, I can see more similarities.

Maybe it's because of my childhood environment in Texas, where most English speakers learn some basic Spanish by interacting with other people.

I would love to see a passage of German that can be intuitively reasoned about by an English speaker with no experience with German solely based on context and perhaps root words.

In all honesty I'd probably get confused though. :(

[DoreenMichele]

Written German and spoken German are somewhat different, just like written and spoken English are. You might find conversational German more legible.

There was an episode of Barney Miller where one of the cops was translating for a German woman. At some point she says "Das ist mein bebe." Bebe is pronounced very similar to baby and means the same thing.

I can't find a video of just the scene. It is Season 5, Episode 5 The Baby Broker.

The Daily Motion has the episode, but it keeps glitching on me. I haven't been able to get to the scene in question.

I also used to have German language resources that built on words that were readily understood by English speakers.

[mikekchar]

English is a kind of mutt language. The Angles, Saxons and Jutes were Germanic tribes and old English (aka Anglo-Saxon) is a Germanic language. In 1066 good old King Harold got an arrow in his eye at the Battle of Hastings and William the Conqueror (from Normandy, France) took over. From that point on, the language of the court in England was French. Over time, more and more of the French language got mixed into what is now known as English. On top of that, in the north you had people speaking Old Norse. Quite a lot of words (IIRC apple, gate and bucket are examples) come from there.

[davidgay]

There's plenty of obvious cognates. Without thinking too much, with rather rusty German, and from your comment:

I = ich

have = habe

hear = hören

before = bevor [in some meanings to be fair]

and = und

[Your first half sentence is a good example :)]

is = ist

can = können [and in general the whole can/können, shall/sollen, will/wollen connection - though the meanings have drifted a bit apart]

when = wenn

learn = lernen

see = seeen

word = wort

More generally, my experience is that literal (i.e., word-for-word) translations from German to English sound weird, but often comprehensible, while literal translations from French usually end up as gibberish.