As both languages share a common root based many hundreds of years ago, you will find a number of words that are very similar if not exactly the same. 

This is also very common amongst Latin based languages such as Spanish, Italian and French, so you might have seen some of these similarities if you’re familiar with those languages.

I love finding the common roots in languages because it helps me learn a lot faster!

That’s one of the handy things about the basic building blocks of language… they allow for common understanding and pave the way to develop that understanding further.

Some are useful for day to day life like ‘bus’, ‘video’, ‘radio’ and ‘computer’, and others are less often used like ‘zebra’, ‘pilot’ or ‘next’.

But what should stand out as a key benefit of this realisation, is that you can use this sneaky little trick to massively increase your vocabulary with hardly any effort at all!

I can hear all the lazy people in the crowd shouting “halleluiah.”

Don’t get too far ahead of yourself… you still have to know which words have the same meaning.

Here are a few really useful links I found that have done the heavy work of finding and listing many of these words:

https://www.englisch-hilfen.de/en/words/true_friends.htm

https://leicht-deutsch-lernen.com/same-words-in-english-and-german (not only is there a list of words, but this page also has lots of mini audio files that tell you how pronounce the words correctly)

https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/5963512/There-are-so-many-German-English-similarities-Perfect-cognates

You should go and have a quick look at those lists right now and see which words might be useful to you. There’s a good chance your increased understanding of German will give your confidence a worthy boost!