Backwards and Upside-Down

Sometimes, the L2 speaker will use a wrong word or phrase, just because there is a gap in their lexical knowledge. For example, I was playing catch with Moshe, age 8, and he asked me to “throw the ball from the bottom.” He simply was not familiar with the term “throw it underhand,” so he used “from the bottom,” which is a word-for-word translation of מלמטה. There are other times, however, when they do know the correct word, but they say the wrong one, probably due to L1 interference. The very same Moshe, upon seeing that his little brother’s pajama shirt was on backwards, said: “Your shirt is upside-down.”  He has used the word “backwards” many times. What seems to have happened here is that the Hebrew word הפוך can be used either for backwards or upside-down, and he just crossed up which one to use.
Addendum: Believe it or not, just two days later, Chana (age 10) made the exact same mistake of using "upside-down" instead of "backwards" for my son's shirt (yes, when he dresses himself, he often puts his shirt on upside-down, I mean backwards).

Word Order

I would conjecture to say that the most common form of cross-lingual interference between Hebrew and English is in choice of word order. However, there are times that there is merely an inversion of the word order, while in other cases it is almost as if a Hebrew sentence is stated in English. For example, Miryam, 12 years old, said: "We got for our teacher something." In this case, the statement "We got something for our teacher," is perfect English, and the "something" was moved to the end of the sentence. This is a syntactic, but not semantic, error. Contrast this with the utterance of Moshe (8 years old): "He came before a year." In English, one would say "He came a year ago." In this case, not only is the word "year" moved from its proper location, but he chose words that are a direct translation of the Hebrew (הוא בא לפני שנה). Here, the error is both syntactic (wrong placement of "year") and semantic (shouldn't have used "before," but "ago").