English speakers learning German arrive with a set of verbal habits that have served them well their whole lives. Softening a request. Apologising before asking a question. Taking a share of the blame to keep things smooth. These habits are so ingrained that most people are not aware of using them at all. In German they do not do the work they were built for, and often they do the opposite. In two decades of teaching German to professionals in London, this is the adjustment I have watched cause more difficulty than any point of grammar.
The core of it is that German is heard closer to the words actually used than English is. An English speaker relies heavily on the gap between what is said and what is meant. “I wonder whether we might possibly look at this again” means change it. “Sorry, could I just ask” means I am about to ask. “That’s an interesting approach” can mean almost anything. Both parties know the words are packaging, and both know how to unwrap them. German has its own courtesies, and it is not a blunt language, but the distance between the words and the meaning is much shorter. When a German speaker hears you apologise, they take it that you are sorry. When you accept a share of the blame, they take it that you are accepting it. There is no unwrapping step, because there is nothing wrapped. This is why the same sentence, translated accurately, can land completely differently.
Apologising in German
The clearest example, and the one I correct most often, is the reflexive apology. English speakers apologise constantly, and almost none of it is about regret. We apologise for asking a question, for taking up someone’s time, for our own poor German, for the weather. It functions as social lubricant. Nobody hears it as a genuine expression of remorse, and nobody is expected to.
Students carry this straight into German. They make a mistake in a lesson and apologise. They ask a colleague something in German and open with an apology for their German. My advice is simple: do not apologise at all. Not because Germans are unforgiving, but because the apology does not read as politeness. It reads as an actual apology, and since there is usually nothing to apologise for, it reads as insincere. An apology in German is understood to mean something. Spend it on nothing and it sounds hollow. Make the mistake, correct it, carry on. That is what a German speaker expects, and it comes across as more confident, not less polite.
The second habit is subtler and matters more in professional settings. An English speaker will often accept responsibility for something they know is not their fault. It is a way of moving a conversation forward without a confrontation: absorb a little blame, defuse the situation, get on with the work. Everyone in the room understands the move, including the person who was actually at fault. Do this in German and you have simply admitted fault. Nobody reads it as a diplomatic gesture, because that convention does not exist. The German speaker takes you at your word. You have said the thing was your responsibility, so it was. For professionals working with German-speaking colleagues, this is worth understanding before it happens rather than afterwards. A habit that smooths things over in an English meeting can quietly rewrite the record in a German one.
What to do instead
The adjustment is not about learning new phrases. It is about noticing which of your English habits are doing invisible work, and letting them go. State the thing. Ask the question. Make the request. Where English adds softeners, German does not need them, and the sentence is complete without them. This feels abrupt at first, in the way that any unfamiliar register does. It is not.
Students often worry that dropping the padding will make them sound rude. In practice the opposite happens. Directness in German is normal, and a learner who manages it sounds more fluent than one who reproduces English politeness in German words. The padding is what marks you out as a foreigner, not the plainness. The same applies in writing, which is one of the reasons German emails can read as blunt to English eyes when nothing unfriendly was intended.
Learning to say a German sentence is a matter of vocabulary and grammar, and both are finite. Learning to think about what you are actually communicating, rather than reaching for the English formula, is a different exercise. It does not come from a textbook and it rarely comes from an app, because it requires someone to notice what you are doing and tell you.
So: do not apologise unless you mean it, do not accept blame that is not yours, and say what you want to say without the packaging. It will feel too direct. It will not sound rude.
Stefan Oloffs has taught German to professionals in London since 2007. Private lessons are available in person across London.