ERROR ANALYSIS BY USING THE PREPOSITIVE COMPLEMENT – A STUDY WITH ALBANIAN-SPEAKING GERMAN LEARNERS IN NORTH MACEDONIA

Abstract

The goal of this paper is the contrastive analysis of the prepositions and prepositional supplements of the German and Albanian language. This paper also analyzes and assesses the difficulties of learning a foreign language and the causes of the error frequency in the Albanian native speakers learning German as a foreign language concerning the prepositions and prepositional supplements. It further provides an overview of the problems during the usage of prepositions required by verbs, adjectives and nouns by Albanian learners of the German language. Additionally, there will be an evaluation of the error analysis and the presentation of some methods which provide an easier way to learn the correct usage of the prepositional objects. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to investigate the reasons for the errors, so they can be avoided in the future. It often happens that foreign language learners unconsciously use a construction from another language when they are in a stressful situation, in which they have not yet mastered this construction in German or they cannot think of the correct form at the moment. However, this does not mean that the construction is necessarily taken from their mother tongue (in our case Albanian). It also happens that learners automatically fall back on another foreign language that they speak better than German. This also applies to the prepositions in prepositional supplements. It often happens that learners use the preposition ‘von’ in German instead the English counterpart ‘from’ or the English preposition ‘to’ instead the German ‘zu’. In their native language, the learners use the correct prepositions because these have already been automated since childhood through extensive influence on the language. In the foreign language, the prepositions still have to be become automatic, although it is quite understandable that the learners unconsciously transfer the prepositions from Albanian or from another foreign language into German. In summary, it takes a lot of patience and practice to master the governed prepositions in prepositional supplements. Further research in the field of the methodology of prepositional objects is urgently needed. There are not enough methodological techniques to make it easier to master the required prepositions.