Sentence Structure
வாக்கிய அமைப்பு
This is the most useful lesson for a Tamil speaker: German sentence structure shares more with Tamil than with English, once you know where to look.
Grammar Comparison
இலக்கண ஒப்பீடு
Verb-second vs. verb-last
Ich esse Reis. (I eat rice — verb in position 2)
நான் சாதம் சாப்பிடுறேன். (I rice eat — verb at the end)
English and German main clauses put the verb early (SVO / V2). Tamil always puts the verb last (SOV). This feels foreign coming from English, but German subordinate clauses ('...weil ich Reis esse' — '...because I rice eat') actually push the verb to the end too, matching Tamil's natural word order more than English ever does.
Case suffixes vs. case articles
den Tisch (accusative 'the table') vs. der Tisch (nominative)
மேசையை (accusative 'table-ACC') vs. மேசை (nominative)
Tamil marks grammatical case with a suffix glued onto the noun (-ஐ, -இல், -உக்கு). German marks the same cases mostly by changing the little article word in front of the noun (der→den→dem→des) instead of the noun itself. Different mechanism, same job: both languages tell you 'who did what to whom' through case, which English mostly abandoned.
Postpositions
meiner Meinung nach ('my opinion according-to' = 'in my opinion')
மேசையின் மேலே ('table-of on-top' = 'on the table')
Tamil almost always places location/relation words AFTER the noun (postpositions). German is mostly prepositional like English (auf dem Tisch = 'on the table'), but keeps a handful of postpositions like nach, gegenüber, and entlang — a small pocket of Tamil-like word order hiding inside German.
Compound words
Handschuh = Hand + Schuh ('hand' + 'shoe' = glove)
கைக்குட்டை = கை + குட்டை ('hand' + 'cloth' = handkerchief)
Both languages love building new words by mashing two nouns together instead of borrowing a new root, unlike English which usually borrows (Latin/French) for such words. If a German word looks long and scary, try splitting it into two smaller German words first — the same instinct Tamil speakers already use for compound நாட்டுச்சொற்கள்.