English and German are cousins, and both borrowed heavily from Latin. The result is that a large number of German words are English words wearing a different suffix. These are not tricks — they are regular correspondences, and once you know them you can guess words you have never been taught, and often be right.
Two things make this more useful than it sounds. The conversion usually tells you the gender as well as the word, and it usually keeps the meaning intact.
Endings that convert almost perfectly
| English | German | Gender | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| -tion | -tion | always die | nation → die Nation |
| -ity | -ität | always die | university → die Universität |
| -ic / -ical | -isch | adjective | realistic → realistisch |
| -ize / -ise | -ieren | verb | to organise → organisieren |
| -ism | -ismus | always der | realism → der Realismus |
| -ist | -ist | always der | artist → der Artist |
| -y (science) | -ie | always die | biology → die Biologie |
| -ure | -ur | always die | culture → die Kultur |
| -ance / -ence | -anz / -enz | always die | distance → die Distanz |
| -ment | -ment | always das | document → das Dokument |
Sound shifts that reveal the everyday words
The conversions above cover the borrowed, formal half of the vocabulary. The everyday half is related in a different way: a set of consonant shifts that happened to German and not to English. Once you see them, ordinary words stop looking foreign.
| English has | German has | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| t | s / ss / z | water → Wasser, foot → Fuß, ten → zehn |
| p | f / pf | ship → Schiff, apple → Apfel, plant → Pflanze |
| k | ch | make → machen, book → Buch, break → brechen |
| d | t | day → Tag, do → tun, drink → trinken |
| th | d | thing → Ding, three → drei, thick → dick |
Read Buch as book with the k softened and it stops being a word to memorise.
The endings that tell you the gender
These are German's own suffixes rather than conversions, but they do the same job — they let you predict rather than memorise.
| Ending | Gender | Example |
|---|---|---|
| -ung | die | die Wohnung |
| -heit | die | die Freiheit |
| -schaft | die | die Freundschaft |
| -ei | die | die Bäckerei |
| -chen | das | das Mädchen |
| -er (person) | der | der Lehrer |
The -chen rule overrides meaning entirely: das Mädchen is neuter even though it means "girl", because -chen wins. There is a whole guide on this — see der, die, das.
Where it goes wrong
Two traps are worth naming, because they catch people who lean on this too hard.
False friends. A handful of words look identical and mean something else. bekommen is "to receive", not "to become". Gift is poison. aktuell means current, not actual. sensibel means sensitive, not sensible. There are perhaps thirty of these that matter, and they are worth learning as a list precisely because everything else transfers so cleanly.
Gender does not transfer. English has no genders to borrow from, so a converted word still needs its article. That is why the endings table above is the useful half: it gives you the gender the conversion cannot.
What to do with this
Do not memorise the tables. Read them twice, then notice the pattern the next time you meet an unfamiliar word — most of the time you will find you already know it. The vocabulary you can guess is far larger than the vocabulary you have studied, and this is the shortest route to it.
Rules stick faster once you have met the words. Every example above links to its own page.
Practise in the trainer