German language programs in Seattle, Washington

Learn German at Seattle Language Academy:
At the Seattle Language Academy (SLA), a language school in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, our aim is to provide top quality leanguage training in a relaxing environment.

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The Modern Languages curriculum is designed to result in broad and well-grounded linguistic proficiency. In the first-year sequence, students learn the core structural elements of the language and gradually build up a working vocabulary of its most common words and expressions. All four language skills – listening, speaking, reading, and writing – are taught simultaneously and from the outset. The second-year sequence, in which students hone their conversational skills and broaden their vocabularies, focuses on review, reinforcement, and expansion.

SLA's foreign-language instructors are professional teachers with extensive classroom experience who bring both linguistic and cultural expertise to the classroom. Currently, 95% are native speakers, and all hold graduate degrees in the language and literature they teach or have completed post-graduate coursework and/or specialized training relevant to the teaching of foreign languages.

General German Classes; Mini-Group German Courses; Intensive German Courses.

German is a member of the West Germanic branch of the Indo-European family of languages. The regional varieties of German fall into two broad divisions: Hochdeutsch ('High German'), spoken in the highlands of the south, and Plattdeutsch ('Low German'), spoken in the lowlands of the north. The standard written language is High German. German was traditionally written in a Gothic script called Fraktur; this was largely abandoned after the Second World War. The current German alphabet is just like that of other western European nations with the addition of the letter ß (double S), which is used only in the lower case.

German has a long and distinguished literary tradition dating from the Middle Ages. Heroic legends are the earliest surviving works in Old High German. The succeeding period of Middle High German was characterized by chivalric poetry; courtly epics, such as Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan and Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, were often based on French troubadour and trouvère sources. The Reformation profoundly influenced the course of German literature, and Martin Luther's translation (1522-34) of the Bible propagated a unified High German language. The great age of German literature began in the 18th century, when the early works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller were written. The plays of Bertolt Brecht and the novels of Thomas Mann and Günter Grass are among the masterpieces of German literature that achieved world-wide recognition in the twentieth century. German is the official national language of Germany and Austria, and is one the four official languages of Switzerland; it is spoken by some 100 million people.