Amharic to German: recover the roles before judging the sentence shape
A compact source verb may become several German words
Amharic can combine a verb with subject agreement and an attached object pronoun. German distributes comparable information across its verb forms, pronouns, and noun phrases. A short Amharic expression can consequently become a longer German clause without becoming an explanation or paraphrase.
The Amharic reference documents ነገረኝ, he told me. That one written form identifies a speaker and an affected first-person participant. In checking a German rendering, account for both roles rather than expecting one target word. Where two people have been mentioned, verify which one performed the telling before deciding whether a German pronoun refers to the right person.
Gender in address is not the same as formality
Amharic masculine and feminine singular you distinguish listeners through different forms. German du does not make that gender distinction. German also has an address distinction involving familiar du and formal Sie, so a translation needs a social choice that the source's gender distinction alone cannot settle.
In a business exchange, decide whether the entire German message should use formal address. Do not choose a gendered German third-person pronoun merely because an Amharic second-person form identifies a woman or man. That would change someone being addressed into someone being discussed, an error that can survive an otherwise plausible word-level comparison.
An article can identify the grammatical role
German marks nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive case. A noun's written form often does not make the distinction obvious; its article may do much of that work. An Amharic reader should therefore treat the small words around a German noun as part of the relationship, not dispensable decoration.
For a giving or sending message, establish sender, recipient, and item explicitly in Amharic. Then follow those participants through the German noun phrases. A familiar-looking name is not enough to verify the recipient, and an article change need not mean that a different person or object has been introduced.
Past meaning does not predict the helper verb
The German reference illustrates ich bin gekommen, I have come, and ich habe gegessen, I have eaten. The perfect construction uses different helpers with different verbs. Selecting a helper by imitating the physical layout of an Amharic past form is therefore unreliable.
Compare the event and its participants first: arrival versus eating, completed action versus a continuing situation, and the person responsible. Then evaluate the German verbal construction as a unit. This avoids a common trap in this direction: correctly identifying that an Amharic event is past but trying to preserve its morphological structure inside a language that organizes its past expressions differently.
Language references