What are some common grammatical mistakes made by native German speakers?

Question

People whose first language is German and whose second or third (or fourth!) is English. People who speak German fluently and natively but learned English afterward. What are some common mistakes they make in speaking or writing when writing in English? Which things do they get confused between the two languages?

JB · Answer

I have no idea. I'm not native to both languages, so I'll be writing from a point of view of a person who isn't native to English and German: I think it's easier to make a grammatical mistake in German. You're going to think of genders, grammatical cases, adjective endings, verb conjugations etc. Simply put, there are more grammatical rules to follow in German than in English. English has stripped off all the unnecessary grammatical complexities. These are my observations.

"Can I load up my Handy?" I can relate to this. Germans use the verb "laden" when charging a battery hence the term "load up". I think Germans would feel more at home using the term "load up" since it's very close to "laden" than it is with the word "charge". And also, cellphone is called "Handy" in German. Everytime I charge my Handy, it says "Akku wird geladen". "geladen" is the past participle form of "laden".

Aliyana · Answer

there are 10 common grammatical mistakes read them here :
http://www.zdeutsch.com/blog/2012/04/10/german-mistake-6-prepositions/
http://www.zdeutsch.com/blog/2012/04/10/german-mistake-10-verbs-with-haben-or-sein/
http://www.zdeutsch.com/blog/2012/04/10/german-mistake-9-capitalization/

http://www.zdeutsch.com/blog/2012/04/10/german-mistake-8-punctuation-and-contractions/

Trending News

What are some common grammatical mistakes made by native German speakers?

2 Answers