Words that look like yours and are not, and the ones that travel in pairs
CEFR C1
The same thing said to a friend and said in a reportChoosing between two forms that are both correct. Spoken German uses weil with the verb…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…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
The two things that make a correct text sound wrong. False friends —Gymnasium is not a gym, aktuell means current and not actual, sensibel means sensitive— and collocations, the fixed pairs you cannot translate piece by piece: eine Entscheidung TREFFEN, Kritik ÜBEN, Rücksicht NEHMEN.
The usual slip. Trusting the resemblance, which fails more often than you would think because German borrowed a great deal of Latin and shifted the meaning. And in collocations, choosing the verb by its meaning: eine Entscheidung machen does not sound wrong, it simply does not exist, and no bilingual dictionary will catch it for you.
Why it catches you out. English has the largest false-friend list of the four, because so much German vocabulary looks familiar: Gift is poison, not a present; bekommen is to receive, not to become; and Handy is a mobile phone. These are the mistakes that get remembered by the people who hear them.