The same thing said to a friend and said in a report
CEFR C1
The German that turns verbs into nounsTurning a verb clause into a noun phrase and back, which is what separates school German…Three-storey sentences: how every verb gets closedWriting and above all READING the long German sentence, the one with a clause inside a…Words that look like yours and are not, and the ones that travel in pairsThe two things that make a correct text sound wrong. False friends —Gymnasium is not a…Daumen drücken, ins Wasser fallen: the bits that do not translateThe expressions a German uses without thinking and that you cannot work out: die Daumen…Reading German aloud: ei, ie, z, v, w, chReading any German word aloud, knowing which letters sound different from how they are…Every noun takes a capital letterCapitalising every noun, and using those capitals when reading to find what a long…The rule, in three lines
Choosing between two forms that are both correct. Spoken German uses weil with the verb in second position, lets the genitive go, says kriegen instead of bekommen and prefers the Perfekt. Written German does the opposite in every one of those. Neither is wrong: each has its place, and using the other gives you away more than a grammar mistake does.
The usual slip. Writing the way you speak, which turns a work email into a text message; and speaking the way you write, which sounds like an old-fashioned announcer and makes people uncomfortable. The second is commoner in anyone who learnt from books: nobody says Ich habe die Absicht, morgen zu kommen when they mean Ich komme morgen.
Why it catches you out. English marks register mostly with Latin versus Germanic vocabulary —«purchase» against «buy»— and with contractions. German does it with syntax as well, which English never does: the word order of a weil clause changes with the register. And the trap runs the other way too, because German writing tolerates far longer sentences than English writing does.