Typical mistakes made by learners of German
Tuesday, 19th May 2009
German is quite closely related to English and although the two language share quite a lot of vocabulary, there are still lots of differences between them.
Many of the grammatical features of German, such as grammatical gender and noun cases, were features of Old English, but have long since disappeared leaving only a few traces. There are also plenty of words that look and/or sound the same in both languages, but which have different meanings (‘false friends’).
Word order
Learners of German, and other languages, tend to think in their native language and then translate things, at least at first. This doesn’t work very well if you translate too literally from English to German as the word order of these languages is quite different with verbs often appearing at the ends of sentences. The more you hear and read the language, the more familiar you’ll become with the word order.
Gender
In English noun gender is related to biological gender: nouns for male people and animals are referred to as ‘he’, those for females as ‘her’, and others as ‘it’. German also has three genders, which are grammatical rather than biological and their assignment appears to be quite arbitrary, so they have to be memorised when learning nouns. For example das Mädchen (the girl) is neuter but die Frau (the woman/wife) is feminine, der Mond (the moon) is masculine and die Sonne (the sun) is feminine. There are some patterns to the German genders though, for example days, months, seasons and weather are usually masculine; trees, flowers and fruit are usually feminine; and towns, countries and colours are usually neuter.
Case
The definite articles in German change not only to indicate gender, but also for case, which indicates the role a word plays in a sentence. This is something that many learners of German find difficult to grasp as the case system in English isn’t marked overtly, except with pronouns, eg he/him/his. In German, instead of using ‘the’ in all cases, as in English, German articles are ‘der’ (masculine), ‘die’ (feminine) and ‘das’ (neuter) and ‘die’ (plural) in the nominative case, which is used with the subject of a sentence. In the accusative case, which is used with the direct object of the verb, ‘der’ changes to ‘den’, but the other articles stay the same. There are other changes to the direct and indirect articles, as well as to word endings for cases.
One problem with explanations like those above is that many English speakers have not been taught, or do not remember the meaning of grammatical terms like subject, object, nominative, accusative, etc. So an understanding of these concepts comes in very handy when learning German.
More about German evening courses in the UK
More about German evening courses in the US
More about German courses in Germany
Tags: german, learning, languages, language, tailor-made
Posted by Simon Ager under Attitudes to Language Learning,
Permalink
