"Yesterday went I to the store." If that sentence looks almost right to you, your German is showing. It is a word-for-word map of Gestern ging ich in den Laden, and in German it is perfect. In English it is the thing that gives a fluent German speaker away faster than any accent.
The cause is a single rule your brain runs on autopilot: German is verb-second. Whatever comes first in the sentence, the conjugated verb has to sit in second place. English does not care about that rule at all. Once you can see the two spots where it leaks in, you can switch it off. Good news first: English word order is more rigid than German, not less. You are not learning a new system. You are turning one off.
Why "Yesterday went I" feels correct
Gestern ging ich... is literally "Yesterday went I..." Front anything in German and the subject and verb swap seats. Dann sagte er nichts is "Then said he nothing." The verb clamps to position two, so the subject slides in behind it. This is the verb-second (V2) rule, and among the Germanic languages English is the odd one out for keeping plain subject-verb-object instead of V2.
English lets you front an adverb just as freely. It simply refuses to invert afterward. "Yesterday I went to the store." "Then he said nothing." "Last year we moved to Berlin." The time word goes first, the subject stays in front of the verb, and nothing swaps. If you catch yourself putting the verb ahead of the subject in a statement, that is the V2 habit firing. The fix is mechanical: after a fronted word, find the subject and put it back in front of the verb.
The verb that gets kicked to the end
"I know that he every day to the gym goes." No English speaker says this, and every German speaker understands exactly why it comes out. In a German subordinate clause the verb gets exiled to the very end: Ich weiß, dass er jeden Tag ins Fitnessstudio geht. Geht waits at the back of the line. The same thing happens after weil: weil ich müde bin is literally "because I tired am".
English keeps the verb next to its subject in a subordinate clause, in the same spot it sits in a main clause. "I know that he goes to the gym every day." "Because I am tired." The verb does not wait. It comes right after "he" or "I" and does its job.
The same exile shows up in the perfect tense. German sends the past participle to the end: Ich habe gestern meinen Freund gesehen is "I have yesterday my friend seen." English keeps the two halves of the verb together: "I saw my friend yesterday," or "I have seen my friend." Do not let have and seen drift apart. In English they travel as a pair.
One honest caveat, because you will hear the counterexample and doubt me. English sentences can absolutely end in a verb. "The children are playing." "I don't know what he wants." That is fine, and it is not the same thing. What English will not do is take the finite verb of a clause and park it at the far end the way German does. Keep the verb glued to its subject and you never trip the wire.
Time and place trade seats
"I'm going tomorrow by train to Berlin." That is Ich fahre morgen mit dem Zug nach Berlin wearing an English coat, and the pieces land in the wrong order. German likes time before place: morgen (tomorrow) comes well before nach Berlin (to Berlin). English flips it and wants place before time: "I'm taking the train to Berlin tomorrow."
The Cambridge grammar puts English end-of-sentence order as manner, then place, then time: "James played brilliantly in the match on Saturday." Brilliantly is manner, in the match is place, on Saturday is time. German's default runs the other way, time first. Neither language is a straitjacket about this. Both allow shuffling for emphasis. But the default you carry over from German will reliably back-load "tomorrow" into the wrong slot. When a time word and a place word share a sentence, put the place first.
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"Where did he go?" and "Never have I seen such chaos" are almost the only times English puts the verb before the subject. That is close to the whole list: questions, and a fronted negative like "Rarely does she call." Outside of those negatives and questions, English keeps the subject in front of the verb almost everywhere.
For a German speaker this is a relief, not extra homework. German hands you a verb that moves around depending on what you front and whether the clause is main or subordinate. English wants the verb in one place: right after the subject, every time. You are dropping a rule, not adding one. Stop inverting and most of these mistakes vanish at once, because they all came from the same reflex. It is the same story as the other German habits that leak into English: once you name the source, the fix is one move, not ten.
A five-minute drill to switch it off
Write down five sentences that start with a time word (Yesterday, Then, Last week, After the meeting, That's why) and five that contain a "because" or "that" clause (I think that..., because I was late, when she arrives). Say the wrong V2 version out loud first, on purpose. "Yesterday went I home." Let it sound ridiculous. Then say the right one: "Yesterday I went home." The gap between the two is what your ear learns from, faster than any rule you could memorize.
Then keep one self-check running whenever you speak or write: find the verb, and look at what sits directly in front of it. If it is the subject, you are fine. If it is anything else, or if the finite verb is stranded at the end of the clause, you have a V2 leak. Move the subject back in front of the verb and you are done. Conversa is an AI conversation partner you can run these sentences past out loud, saying the fronted-adverb and subordinate-clause versions until the English order stops feeling foreign.
The day "Yesterday went I" starts to sound funny to your own ear is the day the habit breaks. You stop needing the rule, because the wrong version announces itself. Until then, keep the verb next to its subject and let German keep its flexibility. English never asked for it. If you are learning in the other direction too, the mirror version of this problem is what trips up English speakers learning German: they forget to move the verb to position two. Same rule, opposite headache.