: Re: How to write a character speaking in broken english? I found a slightly similar question from 2014 on here but a lot of the answers weren't helpful in my case (as they brought up points of

@Turnbaugh521

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There is an amazing book called 'Learner English', that I discovered while teaching English, that is perfect for helping authors write characters' speech with mistakes and nuances that are specific to a particular language.

It basically has sections for each of a bunch of different languages and it tells you what mistakes that speaker is most likely to make, and why - as in, how it relates to the way their native language works.

For example they might say that in German sentences they tend to put the verb at the end of the sentence, so a German speaker might say something like this in English:

I am to town going.

You can apply these errors to your character's speech to make them sound authentically German.

The book is reasonably expensive, but I think it's a great investment for a writer who might be writing foreign characters.

However, I'm sure they should have it at most reasonably sized libraries, so you could also borrow it for the section you need.

Here are the full details:

Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers: Learner English: A Teacher's Guide to Interference and Other Problems
A Paperback edition by Michael Swan and Bernard Smith

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