The present study offers an empirical analysis, from a contrastive perspective, of the German collocations einer Frage nachgehen and eine Hypothese aufstellen and their Italian equivalents approfondire una questione and fare un’ipotesi. These phraseologisms are characteristic of academic German. The aim is to investigate the potential of a contrastive approach in the field of language teaching, considering that the interlinguistic variation of phraseologisms may represent a source of difficulty in learning German as an L2/L3. The study, which combines qualitative and quantitative methods, examines three main parameters: frequency of use, degree of fixedness, and the range of possible Italian equivalents of these phraseologisms. The analysis is based on authentic data drawn from the comparable subcorpora German Wikipedia 2020 and Italian Wikipedia 2020, from the larger corpora DeTenTen and ItTenTen20, as well as from COPLUS_DE_2025 and COPLUS_IT_2025. The latter were specifically compiled within the framework of the project §§§§COPLUS – Multilingual specialised communication. Linguistic research and the design of a digital learning pathway for German (L3) through English (L2)§§§§ (PRIN 2022). The data analysis was carried out using the Sketch Engine software.