Problems with the Tinder method of learning German

This is the outro to the article Tinder method for learning German.

As always "false friends" is a problem, but there are less obvious and none-the-less essential problems.

Some words are very common on one language, but their cognates are not common in the second language.

Consider the word 'meiden' in German, meaning 'to avoid. It's a common term in the German lexicon. Yet, its English counterpart, 'to mithe', is practically a linguistic relic, barely used in contemporary English. Have you heard the word 'mithe' before? Congratulations, your parents spent a lot of money to send you to the elite boarding school.

Another intriguing case: 'schreiben' (to write). Its closer relative is actually not 'to write', but 'to shrive' (to confess). Their conjugation patterns are similar:

"schreiben-schrieb, geschrieben" vs "shrive, shrove, shriven" (you can find a regular conjugation pattern as well).

Thus, once you see the words like "schreiben" and "meiden" you might not come up with their relatives.

(In case of "schreiben", you might, however, come up with the words like 'scribe' or even 'scribble', and guess the meaning this way).

Another problem is the 'unknown unknown', i.e. there's a pattern out there, but you might not be aware of it.

Take, for example, the word 'father', which translates to 'Vater' in German. Intuitively, you might expect the English word 'brother' to have a German counterpart like 'Broter'. However, the actual German word is 'Bruder'.

Why this simple pattern doesn't work even in core vocabulary on quite similar cases (part of one family even!).

This discrepancy roots back to the Proto-Indo-European language where the words for 'father' and 'brother' had different dynamic accents: first syllable for 'father' and second for 'brother'.

The Verner's Law settles such cases, but this is complicated for language learners.

The solution here is simple. In practical terms, try to guess the meaning of the word in German by reducing it to some English word, but not to deduce which German word might have come from a particular English word (which could be still a fun exercise).

Some of words look actually suspiciously similar. Following the logic of consonant shifts, why is the German lip 'Lippe' and not 'Lüfte'/'Lipfe' etc you name it.

Well this one is due to Luther. The Low German dialects (North of Germany and Netherlands) are closer to English.

Luther translated the Bible into a language that was a mix of dialects, the word for lip came from the Northern dialect, but it could be a word from the South as well which contains an 'f' instead of 'p'.

Another 'unknown unknown' for most of us.

There could be a combo, e.g. the German 'Rat' isn't English rodent 'rat' (it's 'Ratte'), but, a counsel, and 'raten' is to give advice.

False friend? Yes, but also there's also not that common English word 'to rede' that has the same meaning as 'raten'.

Well, at the end, while trying to learn German, you might learn English better as a side effect.