How does German grammar differ from English and affect mistakes

German grammar differs from English grammar in several key areas, which often lead to mistakes by English speakers learning German. The main differences and their effects on mistakes include:

1. Word Order: German has a more flexible and complex word order. It follows a verb-second (V2) rule in main clauses and places verbs at the end in subordinate clauses. English typically has a fixed Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) order. This difference causes errors in verb placement and sentence structure for English learners of German.

2. Cases: German uses four grammatical cases (nominative, accusative, dative, genitive) that affect the forms of articles, adjectives, and pronouns. English has largely lost its case system except for pronouns. English speakers often struggle with correct case usage in German.

3. Gender and Articles: German nouns have three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter), each requiring different articles and adjective endings. English nouns are generally gender-neutral. This can lead to mistakes in article and adjective agreement.

4. Verb Forms and Conjugations: German verbs conjugate more extensively according to person, number, tense, and mood. The use of separable prefix verbs and modal verbs can also be challenging for English speakers.

5. Compound Nouns: German frequently uses long compound nouns, which are less common in English, causing vocabulary and parsing difficulties.

6. Passive Voice and Negation: German passive constructions and negation rules differ from English, sometimes causing comprehension and usage errors.

These differences make German grammar more morphologically rich and syntactically flexible than English, leading to a range of common mistakes from incorrect word order, improper case assignments, wrong article or adjective endings, to verb conjugation errors among English learners of German. ^{1, 2, 3, 4}

References

• Pluricentrism in Education and Communication – Lexical Differences in English and German Varieties – Outcomes of the Research

• CimS – The CIS and IMS joint submission to WMT 2014 translating from English into German

• Shortcuts in German Grammar: A Percentage Approach Phase 1: Adjective endings

• English Interferences in German Sentences

• Superiority in English and German: Cross-language grammatical differences?

• German Grammar in the Students’ Words: The Essentialization of German Grammar by American College‐Level Learners

• Analysing the Writing Skill Self-Efficacy of Students at English and German Language Teaching Departments

• The Development of English Grammar and Reading Comprehension by Majority and Minority Language Children in a Bilingual Primary School.

• Comparative Analysis of Teaching Methods in EFL Education: German and Chinese School Practices Across Levels

• Beyond Grammar and Vocabulary: German and American Differences in Routine Formulae and Small Talk.

• MULTILINGUAL APPROACH TO TEACHING THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH: PROS AND CONS

• Differences in the Comprehension of Passive Voice in German- and English-Speaking Children

• Contrastive Study of Passive Voice of Intransitive Verbs in English and German-based on theConstrual Theory

• Analyzing semantic shifts in English and German by exploring historical influences and societal dynamics

• Cross-linguistic analysis of discourse variation across registers

• The syntactic flexibility of German and English idioms: Evidence from acceptability rating experiments

• A New Aligned Simple German Corpus

• Synthetic and Analytic Present and Past Verb Forms in English, German and Czech

• CimS - The CIS and IMS Joint Submission to WMT 2015 addressing morphological and syntactic differences in English to German SMT

• Functional Variation of German Also across Registers and Speaker Groups

• Adverbial reinforcement of demonstratives in dialectal German

• New Structural Patterns in Moribund Grammar: Case Marking in Heritage German

• Re-evaluating comparison between English and German: Indo-European perspectives

• Anglicisms in German – An Overview with Reference to the Neologismenwörterbuch in the Online-Wortschatz- Informationssystem Deutsch (OWID)

• Processing Factors Constrain Word-Order Variation in German: The Trouble with Third Constructions

• Metrical evidence for the evolution of English syntax