Welcome to Gaia! ::

Hi there.I'm 16 and I'm from the UK
I'm learning French at the moment, skill level intermediate. I would now like to learn the basic of german.

So can anyone give me any useful websites that will help me. I have been searching around and what I'm most worried about finding is help on my prouniciation.[as I'm teaching myself]

Also if anyone is learning German, could they give me some advice on how to tackle this language, plus any advice that has helped yourselves with learning German.

You don't need to tell me the obvious to listen to German Music, Read German books and talk to native speakers as i know this is helpful and i will probably do this when i am more confident.

For now i would like to grasp the basics such as Numbers, Alphabet, Greetings, commons words, etc, etc


So if anyone has any really good German Language learning websites that are good for Beginners that would be great. Oh and also if you could recommend some good text books.



Thanx :]

Websites:
Livemocha.com is good for very basic things (beginning vocabulary, telling time, etc).

About.com has some bilingual texts once you get a little further along.

Later on, you may want to check out www.zdf.de; it's a German TV station that puts most of its content online. Try watching short news segments. You can start with really basic things - listening for words you recognize, trying to understand the temperatures in the weather forcast, etc. It may seem very difficult, but it's really, really good practice.

www.leo.de is a really good dictionary site (it's got German/English, German/French, German/Spanish, and German/Chinese). It also has forums for both English and German speakers where you can get advice and clarifications.

Overall advice:
1. Like French, you need to learn articles. There are some rules you can learn to help you tell what's what (ie: words ending in -ung, -keit, or -schaft are always feminine, words ending in -chen or -lein are neuter), but there is a lot you have to simply memorize.

2. Grammatical cases may seem a little daunting at first, but don't get discouraged. You will get used to them eventually. It may also help to spread them out - worry about nominative and accusative first, then dative, and once you're sure you've got the others down, genitive. German grammar has a reputation among many for being gnarly, but I don't think it's earned. The grammar is much more regular than French.

3. Rejoice- German spelling is much easier than French. It's almost always phonetic, there's only one diacritic (and you can actually hear it!), and you actually pronounce everything that's there.