related discussion: everyday mistakes- German
related discussion: What typical mistakes do native English speak...
und vielleicht noch
related discussion: Fehler auf Deutsch - wie angesehen?

Grammar: Cases, grammatical gender, declension of adjectives, word order (especially in subordinate clauses, I think)

Pronunciation: umlaut (ä,ü,ö), "r" sound

Antiseptic, Personally, I still make mistakes with der, die, das, dem, den, which entails incorrectly declining adjectives and "kein" words. :-)

I nearly forgot - the "ch" sound, of course.
However, at least for Scottish people the "hard" form of "ch" is no problem... : )

My wife is English and one of my former colleagues is American. Both of them speak and write fluent German.
Please don't generalize!

As far as I understood it, the OT's question was about "common" mistakes many native English speakers make when speaking/writing German, and I gave some examples. This doesn't mean that everybody makes those kinds of mistakes, of course.

BTW - making mistakes when learning a language is nothing "bad", and there are definitely some aspects of the German language that are more difficult for English speakers than others and vice versa. I myself have to plead guilty of frequently confusing the "v" and "w" sounds, for example...wery sad : )

Werry, werry bad, Nicky! ;-)

Yoo must doo better, sonst wird das nothing whizz yoo in ziss kountree. ;-)

Ach, I sink zey vill haff vayß off makink me lern...

Präpositionen sind auch eine häufige Fehlerquelle. Gut, damit geht es mir im Englischen/Französischen nicht anders, weil sich wenig so sehr von Sprache zu Sprache unterscheidet wie diese kleinen Wörter...
Der Regisseur meiner englischsprachigen Theatergruppe tut sich mit ihnen auch schwer, sodass wir Anweisungen wie "Du setzt dich neben ihr in die Sofa" erhalten.

Niki, That's one thing I've never really understood just why Germans mispronounce words such as "victory, vision" - they say: Well, we don't have this particular sound - but that isn't true, "V" Wie Wasser - same sound :-)

The problem is there are very few publications to help English speaking learners of German to rectify their more common errors.

There's the umlauts.
There's the word order problem.
There's the intonation problem - how can I achieve the flat intonation of German when English is sing-song???
There's the false friends issue - some words which are common to both languages have a much more -ve connotation in German.

It would be good if some publishing company did construct some material to help English speakers with their particular problems - look at the abundance of materials for Germans learning English

Juju: think how many German-speakers learn English, then think of how many English-speakers learn German. It's not a very big market.

@ #11: "There's the false friends issue - some words which are common to both languages have a much more -ve connotation in German."

What do you mean by "-ve"?

@Kinky: 'negative', I assume ;-)

@tigger: OK, yes, I should have realised that this subject would have been covered before. What about quite accomplished speakers/writers of German, though - are there any clues that give away that the speaker is actually an English native speaker?

And moving on to the second part of my question: are the mistakes different for different versions of English, i.e. are there "typically British" or "typically Australian" mistakes?

Aha! Makes sense: thanks, Anti :-)

So - now I'm wondering what some of the words Juju might have in mind. ("...some words which are common to both languages have a much more -ve connotation in German.")

(Perhaps better in a new thread, though :-))

@Carly: I've often wondered... I think it's probably a case of hypercorrection. At school, you are taught ad nauseam that the English "w" like in "water" is different from the German "w" in "Wasser" - consequently, I am now able to produce a perfect English "w", but not only in the words where it fits but ALL the time. Even when I concentrate really hard and try to say "very" and "vision" properly, it sounds wrong and "too German" to me...: (

Nicki, But it's SOOOO easy - V = WIE WASSER :-))

Carly, I know... my (real) first name starts with an English "V" (= German "w" sound), so I should have a lot of practice pronouncing it. But still... : (

Nicki, Got to thinking, it's almost the exact equivalent of "wie" :-) The "Wasser" doesn't quite ring true - but that's the example I invariably gave to my German colleagues :-)

Thanks, I'll keep trying : )

Carly, warum schreibt Ihr dann nicht auch einfach wery und wision, das würde das Ganze doch viel leichter machen ;-)?

RB :-)) Because as you well know, we've reserved a different pronouniciation for "w" :-)

>>What about quite accomplished speakers/writers of German, though - are there any clues that give away that the speaker is actually an English native speaker?

I would be interested in that one too.

One that comes to mind that I myself have trouble with (and I'm really still only sort of intermediate, not even advanced) is giving up the sequence-of-tenses rule. It's very hard for me to feel good about producing a sentence like 'Ich dachte, er ist ...'; I always want to use 'er war.' (And many German speakers seem to have the same problem in reverse.)

The corollary to that is remembering the reported-speech rule: 'Sie sagten, er sei ...' (Though I realize that's more for writing than casual conversation.)

Hm-us, in your example sentence, I think most German speakers would say, 'ich dachte, er wäre...' rather than 'ich dachte, er ist'. I'm not sure if that's technically correct, but I am sure it is very common. Natives, what say ye?

Agreed!

Das war jetzt etwas missverständlich von mir, sorry. Ich stimme der Aussage zu, dass die Nutzung von "wäre" in dem genannten Beispiel sehr weit verbreitet ist; ob es grammatikalisch 100% korrekt ist, kann ich so aus dem Stegreif auch gerade nicht sagen.

My German teacher (God rest his soul!) told us that

"Ich dachte, er sei krank" is a neutral statement, i.e. you don't say whether you believe him.

"Ich dachte, er ist krank" implies that you believe him.

"Ich dachte, er wäre krank" means you think he's just feigning illness.

To my knowledge, all sentences are grammatically correct. In colloquial speech, however, the first form (Konjunktive I) isn't used very often, and I'm not sure that saying casually "Ich dachte, er wäre..." always has to mean that you doubt his statement.

@27: Diese Unterscheidungen sind ein altes Geruecht. Der Grammatik-Duden meint dazu:

"Eine solche Deutung der Formen wird manchmal noch vorgetragen, entbehrt aber der Grundlage."

Ich bin froh, dass ich Deutsch sprechen kann, und zwar meistens von der Grammatik her auch richtig. Allerdings kann ich nicht erklären, warum manches so ist wie es ist.
Offensichtlich haben aber viele Deutsche auch große Probleme (besonders im Ruhrgebiet).
Da kommen so Sätze zustande wie, z.B., statt: "Ich hatte mir damals die Schuhe gekauft." - Ich hatte mir damals die Schuhe gekauft gehabt. Da rollen sich mir die Fußnägel auf .... ;-)

Mir ist aufgefallen, dass viele Briten Probleme haben, das Wort "Eltern" richtig auszusprechen. Es klingt häufig so wie "Elten".

@Londoner: re #28, oh great;-)! Someone else explained the tense usage to me the same way as in Nicki's post #27 and I thought I knew where I was with the nuances, like with anscheindend and scheinbar, but now I'm back to square one...

On a general note, a few months ago, I read a book recommended to me by a German friend: "Der, die, was? Ein Amerikaner im Sprachlabyrinth" by David Bergmann, which will definitely ring some bells with English native speakers learning/speaking German.

The thing I find most difficult (not that I don't get loads of other things, like gender, wrong) is knowing when to break the rules. For example, when can I say "wegen dem"? Would I sound really pompous in some circumstances by using "wegen" + genitive?

@Anne: Ich bin nicht zum Feuerwerk gegangen wegen des Lärms. That would be ok. In the Ruhr people would probably say: "Ich bin nicht zum Feuerwerk gegangen wegen dem Lärm." or, possibly even, ".... wegen de*n* Lärm." ;-(

Verwendet mit "wegen" schriftlich ausschließlich den Genitiv, mündlich könnt ihr auch den Dativ verwenden in weniger formalen Situationen. Aber mit dem Genitiv seid ihr immer auf der sicheren Seite, nur der ist korrekt - was sich vermutlich in absehbarer Zeit ändern wird, er stirbt aus.

Echt, Londoner? Komisch, ich habe schon genau das Bedeutungsgefühl bei Konjunktiv I und II. Aber das gilt auch nur für das Schriftliche.

Wolfman: Ruhr-korrekt heißt es natürlich "Ich war gerade die Schuhe dran am kaufen, als...".