Abstract This paper presents research that investigates differences in the use of the high-frequency verb TAKE between German learners of English and American English native speakers. This study examined 724 instances of TAKE and their respective lexical-syntactic structures in the German part of the ICLE and a comparable American English speaker corpus (LOCNESS). The sentences are classified according to a framework of complexity of lexical-syntactic structures adopted from Liu and Shaw (2001). The results of this research suggest that there are no significant differences in usage between both groups. The general conception that non-native speakers overuse simple verbs due to restricted vocabulary does not hold true for TAKE in the German learner data in this study.