German for Programmers
wickedchicken.github.io
German for Programmers
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Re: German for Programmers
#2[deleted]
Re: German for Programmers
#3About the nonsensical assignment of gender to nouns I agree in principle but just a quick tip for the particular example in the footnote: “Mädchen” ends in -chen which is the diminutive form of a word (originally “die Magd” for a young woman). All words ending in -chen are neutral. Similarly, “das Bübchen” could refer to a young boy and is also neutral.
Hope this helps and good luck with learning German. If it wasn’t my native language I wouldn’t want to learn it but I do love it.
Re: German for Programmers
#4Anyone wanting help with German grammar, I thoroughly recommend the dartmouth german grammar pages [0]. (I used them for GCSEs and A-Levels). They have a page explaining the bracket structure [1]
[0] https://www.dartmouth.edu/~deutsch/Grammatik/Grammatik.html
[1] https://www.dartmouth.edu/~deutsch/Grammatik/WordOrder/MainC...
Re: German for Programmers
#5The thing I and many other people hate the most in any language that has it (German included) are cases. The rest is easy.
Re: German for Programmers
#6The thing I and many other people hate the most in any language that has it (German included) are cases. The rest is easy.
Personally love them. Not so much in German, but in Russian they make word order wonderfully flexible. You can just blurt stuff out, adjusting the case as you go along, to build a sentence, rather than having to go back and restart.
What bugs me with German inability to reliably form plurals and having adjective endings vary by determiner (though not difficult to learn, but just seemingly serving no useful purpose).
For me I found aspect in Russia the most difficult thing grammatically to grasp. I hear learning articles from an "articleless" language is similarly difficult.
Re: German for Programmers
#7Good job on attempting to map German to some programming concepts.
German cases have to be learned by listening to others, as your post kind of alludes to but may not be obvious to people, is that the gender assignment is not intuitive and too much of a sentence relies on knowing the gender assignment of a noun.
Fortunately, in a conversation you can listen to which suffixes people use, to reverse engineer the gender assignment of the noun. You have to store the experience in your mental hashmap and always assign the noun that way. The classical conditioning comes when people look at you ridiculously and disagree with your sentence structure, you'll re-evaluate quickly to avoid that.
Re: German for Programmers
#8This is blocked for me by Cisco Umbrella? :S
Re: German for Programmers
#9I am currently learning (german) sign language and I see very many parallels to programming languages there as well. Eg the subject object verb sentences structure reminds me of a stack machine and establishing references points (for persons or objects) in the space around your body in order to later in the sentence (or in future sentences) related to to them reminds me of register allocation.
Re: German for Programmers
#10The thing I and many other people hate the most in any language that has it (German included) are cases. The rest is easy.
I quite like the cases, personally. If you're not in a more formal context or writing (like say you're talking to friends or so) it lets you be a bit more fast and loose with word order, plus it can let you say things more concisely than you can with english. The only real solid annoyances I've had were adjectives. Learning all of the rules and endings around them sucked on some level and it felt really quite superfluous, but once you get them and you can gauge correctness just based on it "sounding right" it's not so bad.