Common English mistakes German speakers make at work

Many German speakers write very good English, which makes the remaining mistakes stand out more. Most of them come from words that exist in both languages with different meanings, and from a few places where German grammar works differently: seit, bis, the spoken past tense and word order. None of them make you hard to understand. They do make a message read as translated.

Here are the ones that come up most in work email and Slack, the German pattern behind each, and what a native speaker would write instead.

False friends that look identical

These are the classics. The German word is spelled almost the same, so in a quick message nothing looks wrong. To a native reader, though, some of them say something quite different.

And three that tend to appear in meetings and reports:

Small words: also, who and where, learn and teach

A few short words cause trouble out of proportion to their size. German also means so or well; English also means in addition. Wer sounds like English where, and wo sounds a bit like who, so the two get swapped when you type fast. And while standard German keeps lernen and beibringen apart, everyday speech in many regions uses lernen for both, which carries over as “learn me”.

“Make a break”: when English says take

German machen appears in a lot of fixed phrases: Pause machen, ein Foto machen, eine Prüfung machen. In English, several of them use take instead.

“I am here since Monday”: seit and the present perfect

German uses the present tense with seit: Ich bin seit Montag hier. Wir nutzen Jira seit drei Jahren. English needs the present perfect, and it splits seit into two words: since with a starting point, for with a length of time.

The past tense causes the opposite problem. Spoken German uses the Perfekt for almost any past event (Ich habe gestern mit dem Kunden gesprochen), so “I have talked” feels like the normal past. In English, a finished time like yesterday or last week takes the simple past.

Until vs by

Bis Freitag works for both a deadline and a period of time. English splits it. Until is for something that lasts up to that point: I’m on vacation until Friday. By is for a deadline: Send it by Friday.

At the moment, at the end, most people

A few prepositions and articles come straight from German set phrases. Im Moment and am Ende both become at in English. Die meisten loses its article. And Informationen is a normal plural in German, while English information has no plural at all.

Word order

German is flexible about where adverbs and time words go, and often puts them early: Wir haben gestern das Budget besprochen. English is stricter. The object comes right after the verb, and time usually goes at the end.

Requests, please and sign-offs

In German, bitte plus an imperative is a normal, polite request: Bitte schicken Sie mir die Unterlagen. In English, “Please send me the documents” is fine once, but a message made of imperatives reads like a list of instructions, even with a please on each line. A question sounds like a request.

Bitte also means you’re welcome, which English please never does. And English has no Sie and du: most workplaces use first names, even with senior people, and politeness comes from word choice instead. If you don’t know a name, “Hello” or “Hi there” sounds more current than “Dear Sir or Madam”. There’s more on tone in casual vs formal English at work.

A quick check before you hit send

• Scan for become, eventually, actual, also and control. Did you mean get, possibly, current, so and check?
• Since or for with something still going on: have plus the past participle.
• Yesterday, last week or a date: simple past.
• Deadlines take by, not until.
• Nothing between the verb and its object.
• A request reads better as a question.

Let a shortcut catch the rest

False friends are the hardest mistakes to catch yourself, because the word looks right. AI Grammatic is a Mac menu bar app that checks this in place. Select text in any app, press ⌘⌥E, and about a second later it’s replaced with a version that sounds like a native speaker wrote it: false friends, tenses and word order fixed, with your meaning, names and links kept. ⌘Z brings back the original.

You can also write in German and get natural English back:

Try it on one of your own sentences in the live demo, or read more about AI Grammatic for non-native English speakers.