1. A Comparison of German and
English –
from the perspective of an ESL teacher
Lauri Rintelman
Wilkes University

2. The Alphabetic System
German English
• Latin Based • Latin Based
• 27 letters including ß • 26 letters
/eszett/ sounds like ss • Complicated pronunciations
• Vowel pronunciations stable
• ä, ö, ü der Umlaut is added
to form a type of diphthong

3. Nouns
German English
• All nouns capitalized • Proper nouns capitalized
• Nouns are either masculine, • Nouns have no gender
feminine, or neutral
• Indefinite articles: a/an in
front of unfamiliar noun
• Definite articles
• Definite article: the in front
are placed in front of specific noun
of nouns:
• Indefinite
articles are
placed in front
of nouns:

4. Cases
German English
•German has four • English lost its case
cases: nominative markings during the Middle
accusative English period.
dative
genitive

5. German Articles:
English only has……..

6. Word Order
• English has a specific Subject-Verb-Object
order.
• German needs no specific order because the
four cases define which items are direct
objects.
• Example: In English, we say:
I threw some hay over the fence to the horse:

7. Word Order
• In German, a person may say
“I threw a horse over the fence some hay.”
The German listener knows that it was the hay thrown over
the fence; not the horse because of the cases used. The
problem is that this does not directly translate into English.
German is not dependent on word order for meaning.

8. Case Study
A woman who immigrated to the United States from Germany
as an adult seventeen years ago speaks English very well. In
an interview over a period of several hours, some errors did
occur:
Pronunciation: 4
Adding plural ‘s’ to a noncount noun: 2
Ex: furnitures
Wrong word choice: 7
Ex: It was a long travel.
Pronoun Replacement: 6
Ex: What is mandatory (should be: It is mandatory.)
Word Order: 10
Ex: He spoke fluently Spanish.
We spoke frequently German.
I have two songs in my head stuck.
The most obvious problem was the word order.

9. Positives:
• The German and English alphabet are very
similar.
• German and English have many cognates.
• Nouns and articles are much easier to
understand in English because nouns have no
gender and there are only 3 articles in English.
• English has no case markings to learn.

10. Negatives:
• English pronunciations have changed over the
centuries and are not obvious or logical.
• Word order is crucial in English. German word
order can not be directly translated to English.
• Nouns are harder to recognize in English
because they are not all capitalized.