[Switch to an English version of this post] Das englische Wort loser wird auch im Deutschen gerne verwendet. Loser hat sogar den Weg in den Duden gefunden, obwohl es mit Verlierer und Versager eigentlich brauchbare Alternativen gibt. Abgesehen davon, dass man sich fragen sollte, ob man wirklich jemanden so bezeichnen möchte, machen viele den Fehler,
The English language makes it relatively easy to write in a gender-neutral way because nouns in general do not have a gender; a gender is only specified when referring to people or animals. Hence, there is only one indefinite article (the) and two definite articles (a or an, see here). Compare this to German, where
The English language offers some very interesting ways to shorten names. First, it is common to abbreviate double names (two first names, as opposed to double-barrelled names which correspond to two last names) by their initials. For example, the son of Anthony Soprano in the fantastic TV series The Sopranos is usually called A J
Most high-quality science journals have editors who will proof-read your manuscript before it is printed or published online. While not all journals exclusively employ native speakers as editors, their English is typically very good. Therefore, the proofs you receive should not be regarded as an annoying hurdle on the way to another publication, but can
On a recent commute to work, I happened to notice the words Logistic Center written in huge letters on a company building here in Germany (you can see it in one of the pictures here). As mentioned in a previous post, there are many false friends of this type that differ from the correct English
Since a substantial part of the material covered in this blog comes from my encounters with scientific papers and talks, I am wondering how many of you would actually like to get feedback regarding potential shortcomings regarding their English skills. I have never been a fan of public practise talks, simply because I think that
The German word Kindergarten has become part of the English language in the form of kindergarten. Interestingly, many native and non-native speakers instead use kindergarden. However, the dictionaries I consulted only include the word kindergarten. Moreover, there is no official support for pronouncing kindergarten like kindergarden. The Oxford Learner’s Dictionary provides the British and the
I have noticed that people with a German-speaking background often mix up conventions when writing letters and emails in English. For example, in German, the text directly after the greeting is considered to be a continuation of the greeting itself. Therefore, the first word starts with a capital letter if it is a noun or
The abbreviation KO (also K.O.) stands for knock out. It has its origin in the sport of boxing. Interestingly, in colloquial German, KO is often used in phrases such as Ich bin ein wenig KO (= I am a bit exhausted) or Er ist ganz schön KO (= He is quite exhausted). However, I don’t
I have noticed that words such as careful, beautiful or sinful are often misspelled as carefull, beautifull or sinfull. A spell checker will often flag such mistakes. However, in scientific writing, there are many technical expressions not recognized by the spell checker anyway, so that such mistakes will remain unnoticed. The best example I can