Hyphen: German speakers seem to have a thing for the punctuation mark known as ‘hyphen’. ‘c’/’k’ confusion: Many Germans confuse English ‘c’ with German ‘k’, thus spelling ‘doctor’ as ‘doktor’, or ‘coffee’ as ‘koffee’.‘-sh’/’-sch’ confusion: The -sh ending in certain words often becomes -sch, turning ‘English’ into ‘Englisch’, ‘fish’ into ‘fisch’, or ‘foolish’ into ‘foolisch’.An example could be translating ‘Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften’ as ‘insurance-companies-providing-legal-protection’. This is often reflected when German-speaking writers translate such words into English. Words running into each other: Really long words packing in a lot of complex meaning are a common feature of the German language.As a result, German writers often use a full stop (aka period) to group digits (12.345), and employ the comma as the decimal mark (123,45). This system is the opposite of the Continental convention. Comma (,) vs decimal point (.): In English-speaking countries, a full stop or period is used as the decimal mark (123.45), while a comma (,) is used to group digits (12,345).as ‘awayrun’, ‘awaythrow’ (‘weglaufen’, ‘wegwerfen’). Besides, it is a mistake to write ‘run away’, ‘throw away’, etc. Example: He ran away from home -> He ran from home away. Separable verbs: Unlike German, English does not have separable verbs and this fact creates a lot of problems.In English, only proper nouns are written in upper case (Tom, Hamburg, Kodak), but not common or abstract nouns (school, potato, freedom). Capital problem: A common Germanism is the random use of upper case or capital letters in nouns.And since you would like to qualify as a perfect English speaker/writer, we suggest you avoid these 10 common ‘Germanisms’: Avoid these errors and pretend to be a native user of English In fact, it is so wonderful that many Germans still try to use German grammatical patterns when writing in English! This makes your text look like, written by…umm…a German.
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