Let me share some of the most interesting English blunders I encountered during a recent physics conference in Germany. Mistake 1: Several German native speakers made the mistake of pronouncing the th in thermal and thermodynamic as a t rather than a θ. Since most of them pronounced other occurrences of th correctly, I suspect
Here is an interesting grammatical fact about the nouns mail and email. In English, mail is an uncountable noun (see here), which means that Send me a mail is not grammatical. However, even though email (or E-mail) is a short form of electronic mail, it can be both countable and uncountable (see here). Hence, Send
Today, I want to present three expressions that can lead to serious life-and-death-type misunderstandings. Two of them are false friends (English expressions that are used in German with a very different meaning), and one is a very dangerous literal translation. Body bag Whereas a body bag in German is a bag to transport your personal
The English expression self-made is quite often incorrectly used as a translation of the German word selbstgemacht. A classic example is I brought self-made cake to work today. (Wrong) Interestingly, the situation is more complicated than I expected. In particular, whether or not self-made is a false friend (and should be replaced with home-made) depends
I recently came across a hilarious false friend in the discussion forum of a newspaper website. A German native speaker who seemed to be very keen on using English expressions accidentally translated the colloquial German expression “Eier haben” (Mut haben, to have courage) as “to have eggs” by writing Der Mann hat eggs. The correct
My fellow German native speakers tend to make the mistake of translating the expression studieren gehen as to go studying. However, the correct English expression is to go to university. Moreover, in a previous post, I had pointed out that the noun study is not the English translation of Studium but instead means Studie. Therefore, a
German native speakers often believe that the expression “to blame oneself” is the English equivalent of “sich blamieren”. However, “to blame oneself” means to hold oneself responsible for something bad, and translates to “sich selbst die Schuld geben” in German. A correct English expression for “sich blamieren” is “to make a fool of oneself”.
In this post, I want to discuss some fascinating mistakes made even by very advanced speakers. They concern expressions which are borrowed from their native language (called Germanisms when borrowed from German), and are not used by native English speakers. The examples given below are typically absent in formal writing, but often show up in
A while ago, at the airport, I overheard a conversation in which a German speaker asked a native speaker “Is that brutto or netto income?”. Understandably, the other person was very confused. As you may already suspect, the words brutto and netto are not part of the English language. The corresponding English words are gross
Prepositions are not at all logical, especially if you try to translate from one language to another. However, they can significantly change the meaning of English words and phrases and you should therefore try hard to get them right. For example, I frequently hear people say concerned about when they actually mean concerned with. According