GRAMMAR DEFICIENCY AFFECTED BY GERMAN GRAMMATICAL GENDER AMONG SINHALESE LEARNERS OF GERMAN AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE IN SRI LANKA

Abstract

In learning German as a foreign language, the acquisition of grammatical gender poses a challenge to beginners when it comes to appearing in articles for nouns, unlike Sinhala. This study investigated the main reasons for difficulties of acquiring German grammatical gender L1 as Sinhala Students and this study insight into contrastive aspects of Sinhalese and German gender.For beginners, acquiring the grammatical gender of German has often been viewed as a problem whereas their mother language does not have a grammatical gender system. According to the analysis of collected data, it has been identified that Multilingual and bilinguals acquire this grammatical gender concept better than monolinguals. Along with that lack of understanding of German language structure and ignorant of derivational suffixes that help to identify the gender of a noun in German, is also one of the reasons for this problem. Therefore, this paper presents a set of guidelines that help Sinhalese native speakers to use German articles correctly.