The Roots Series · German
German Roots
The half of English you already think in.
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The words you reach for without thinking — house, drink, fight, begin — are the oldest in English, the layer that was already here before 1066. They are short, blunt, and they build: snap two together for household and forecast, bolt on an ending for kingdom and fearless. Learn how the pieces lock, and the everyday core of English opens like a hinge.
The words that were already here
Before the French, before the Latin — the Germanic bedrock of English.
Before 1066, English was a Germanic language, and the words that survived from it are still the ones you reach for first: house, drink, eat, fight, begin, understand. Short. Concrete. The words children learn, the words you think in, the words that carry weight without trying.
They are also the most productive layer in the language. Germanic English builds by clicking whole words together — breakthrough, understand, weekend — and by bolting on a small kit of native pieces: the prefixes fore-, over-, un-, mis- and the endings -ness, -dom, -hood, -ful. Add the phrasal verbs — give up, find out, get over, the despair of every learner — and you have the machinery behind a huge share of everyday English.
house, drink, fight. The plain, early words — the half of English you never had to study.
Click them together, bolt on the native endings, add a particle — and the small old core throws off half the dictionary.
A word is an assembly
German English builds from pieces you already own. Tap one to take it apart.
The native bolts
A handful of old prefixes that snap onto almost any plain word — and change it.
The words you already know
If your first language is Germanic, this layer was never foreign — it is a cousin you haven't been introduced to.
If your first language is German, Dutch, or a Nordic tongue, a large part of this pack is already yours — you only have to be shown the seam. The pack makes the cousins explicit and turns the shared ancestor into an unfair advantage.
One law runs under every cognate. Latin's p is English's f; its t is English's th; its hard c is English's h. Once you hear the shift, the whole family tree snaps into focus — and the Latin Roots pack starts to rhyme with this one.
From the first word to the deep tongue
The pack runs five tiers, T1 to T5 — from the word a child meets first to the old root underneath it all.
- sunlightsun + light — the plainest compound, transparent to a five-year-old
- understandunder + stand — an everyday word with a worn-smooth metaphor inside it
- freedomfree + dom — an abstraction built from an old ending meaning "domain, condition"
- wyrdOld English for fate; it survived, worn down, as the modern word "weird"
- word-hoardwordhord — the Old English kenning for the store of words you carry inside you
Flashcards as an integrated system
- Cards
- 1,000 words across 48 clusters — each card carries a definition, an example sentence, and a usage note that places the word precisely.
- Fibonacci SRS
- Rate each card 0–5. The better you know a word, the longer before it returns — spaced repetition on Fibonacci intervals.
- Boss fights
- Each cluster — a prefix, a family of compounds, a set of phrasal verbs — is gated by a duel you can't win without its hardest members.
- Graduation
- Beat a cluster and its cards leave your daily deck for good. The deck gets smaller as you learn.
- How words build
- Where a word is a compound or carries a native prefix or ending, the note shows the parts — so understand comes apart into under + stand.
- Audio
- Clean Piper text-to-speech on every word and example sentence. CC BY / MIT / Apache-licensed voices.
- Lessons
- Reference lessons fire at the point in the sequence where they unlock what you're about to read.
Part of the Roots Series
The shape of English and its neighbours, made visible.
The Germanic backbone of everyday English — the words you already half-know.
You are hereThe second English — 1066 and the French that came with it.
English built from its parts — the classical and scientific layer, assembled.
The vocabulary of science, medicine, and abstraction — the layer above Latin.
Coming soonLearn the words you think in.
1,000 words · 48 clusters · the native prefixes, compounds, and phrasal verbs · how every word is built. The complete word list, every reference lesson, and a playable boss-fight demo are on the website.
Get German Roots on Steam →