What’s Hard in German? – A Corpus-Based Analysis of Structural Learner Difficulties in German as a Foreign Language

This project seeks to systematically identify linguistic structures of German that pose a specific difficulty for the acquisition of German as a foreign language (GFL). Conventionally, this is done by observing learner errors (see Borin & Prütz 2004 or Westergren-Axelsson & Hahn 2001). However, if learners avoid difficult elements, this method fails. We claim that the relative underrepresentation of structures in learner data implies that these structures are difficult to acquire. Therefore, we propose a systematic study of underrepresented structures.