the reason the words seem similar to English is because English is a very Germanic language... in fact, Old English (aka Saxon, and very close to Low
German) is more Germanic in many ways than Old High
German, because it developed farther removed in the Northern lowlands, where High
German was set amidst a hub of language traffic and it reflects it in many of its loanwords... English has its own horde of borrowed words from Latin, French, ect. though, besides becoming totally weird (in the context of its related family members) as an syntactical language and tossing gender and inflection to the wind, yet keeping strong verb forms and irregular plurals, just to keep things confusing

... English and
German actually have many common terms like stark, swart, fast (as in hold fast), although much of it is considered arachaic these days (yet slang is making a comeback to Old Germanic, with -z and -a endings!) but the commonality is pretty cool and makes learning easy for both... Dutch and the various Scandinavian languages shouldn't be forgotten either

Ja, mann!
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