The main aspects of learning german as a second foreign language after english

Abstract

German as a foreign language is learnt after English (GaE) in the majorityof cases; typically as a third or further language; by native speakers of Englishsometimes as a second language. Transfer from English to the learner’sGerman interlanguage is frequent due to the close genetic relation between bothlanguages, and often positive. However, there are instances where Englishpatterns are hindering rather than fostering the acquisition of Germanstructures, such as German morphosyntax. Seen from the viewpoint of English,German is in danger of being stereotypically perceived as a «difficult»language with a complex syntax and a plethora of cumbersome morphologicalstructures such as inflectional suffixes. Mark Twain’s witty remarks about the«awful German language» are a testimony to that stereotypical perception,gently mocking the German language and at the same time the naïve approachto it by English speakers. Both in its rigid SVO sentence structure and in itscomplete equation of grammatical gender with sex, English is not only differentfrom German, but actually the «odd one out» among all Germanic languages.So in the case of GaE, the problem and a possible way of overcoming it doesnot so much lay with German, but with English as a base from which Germanis learnt. A simple and memory friendly didactic method can make learners ofGaE aware of the differences and help them to develop the respective Germanstructures in their interlanguages. With the visual help of a bridge, the syntacticbracket structures of German main and subordinate clauses can bedemonstrated. The part grammatical gender plays for noun brackets in German can also be illustrated by the bridge model, thus providing an explanation forthe existence of grammatical gender in German to learners of GaE andmotivating them to learn the gender together with each German noun,understanding it as a tool to organize syntactic and textual structures. Thus theadvances linguistic theory has made in the last decades in analyzing thefundamental bracketing structures underlying Deutsch nach Englisch:Didaktische Brücken für syntaktische Klammern 99 much of Germanmorphosyntax can be applied in form of a didactic tool facilitating the learningof German, particularly of GaE