Problems of meaning

More than two-thirds of errors made by advanced English-speaking learners of German involve matters of vocabulary. The central problem is that different languages reflect a different perspective of the world in their vocabulary. Each language divides up things, ideas, events, etc. in terms of words from a quite different viewpoint, categorizing and drawing distinctions in an individual way. The result is not just that there are words in German which are ‘untranslatable’, such as gemütlich, but that for much of the vocabulary we do not find any one-to-one correspondences between an English word and a German word. Cases of exact equivalence, such as Baum/tree or Tisch/table are relatively rare. Learning German involves learning how to break out of the English framework of meaning and operate in the framework peculiar to German. As we are dealing with individual words, there are no rules; each word has to be taken on its own terms and there may be contexts where more than one will serve equally for a particular English word.

The following sections aim to explain some of the most confusing cases where the range of meaning of a word or group of words in one of the languages does not correspond to that of the nearest equivalents in the other.