Re: Losing languages ...

 --- Andreas Johansson ha tera a:

> In response to all the people to replied to my comment re: my stay
> here in Germany destroying my English:
>
> I note most of you say you're just losing lexicon. While I too find
> myself throwing German words into (supposedly) English sentences, I
> also find myself stringing English words together with germanesque
> syntax; monstrosities "because I in the city was" has passed my lips
a
> couple of times since coming here (cf German "weil ich in der Stadt
> war").
I've never had two non-native languages at the level where the
influence of one on the other was interesting, but German (my L2) has
had such interesting effects on my English (L1) too, particularly when
I've been in a German-language context for a while.

I've noted some sentence-level syntactic mistakes like you describe..
I've also noted some instances where I've trans-worded German idioms
into English, for example:

"the both of them" instead of "both of them"
(German: die Beide von ihnen)

"What for an X is that" instead of "what kind of X is that"
(German: Was fuer ein X ist das?)   [sorry, forget how to type umlauts
on windows computers.]

"the text over X"  instead of "the text about X"
(German: das(?) Text ueber X)   ("ueber" = "over" in spatial sense)

Estel

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