Some peculiarities of learning German asthe second foreign language after English

German as a foreign language is learned after English (GaE) in the majority of cases; typically as a third language; by native speakers of Ukrainian sometimes as a second language. Transfer from English to the learner's German interlanguage is frequent due to the close genetic relationship between both languages, and often positive. However, there are instances where English patterns are hindering rather than fostering the acquisition of German structures, such as the German lexicon. Seen from the viewpoint of English, German is in danger of being stereotypically perceived as a “difficult” language with complex syntax and a plethora of cumbersome morphological structures such as inflectional suffixes. Both in its rigid sentence structure and its complete equation of grammatical gender with sex, English is not only different from German, but the „odd one out” among all Germanic languages. So in the case of GaE, the problem and a possible way of overcoming it do not so much lay with German, but with English as a base from which German is learned. A simple and memory-friendly didactic method can make students of GaE aware of the differences and help them to develop the respective German structures in their interlanguage. With the visual help of a bridge, the syntactic bracket structures of German main and subordinate clauses can be demonstrated. The part grammatical plays for the noun in German can also be illustrated by the bridge model, thus providing an explanation for the existence of grammatical gender in German to students of GaE and motivating them to learn the gender together with each German noun, understanding it as a tool to organize syntactic and textual structures. Thus the advances linguistic theory has made in the last decades in analyzing the fundamental bracketing structures underlying German after English: Didactic Bridges for syntactic brackets 99 much of German morphosyntax can be applied in form of a didactic tool facilitating the learning of German, particularly of GaE.