German for Programmers • Hacker News Board

Re: German for Programmers

#11

Post by aasasd » Fri, Feb 08, 2019, 2:07 AM UTC

> Prepositions claim different areas of ‘cognitive space’ in English and German

The thing about pre/postpositions is, their use is almost entirely idiomatic in modern language, i.e. it doesn't follow from the meaning of individual parts and thus doesn't translate without reconstruction.

In English, afaict, practically all adpositions signify relations in space or time, plus there are ‘of’ and ‘for.’ However, once you begin dealing with even slightly more abstract notions, these semantics break―and you just have to pick a word that you will use, without ties to its meaning. “The paper is on the table” is straightforward, as it uses the original meaning of ‘on,’ but you can't say why it's “We speak in English” and not e.g. ‘under English.’

So, German and other languages simply picked different words: it's not like you can complain that some inherent semantics are violated by that.

It's pretty much the same in e.g. Russian with prefixes, since many of them also originally denote spatial relations, and this derivation with prefixes is used in much the same way as with adpositions in English. (Speaking ‘in English’ is actually something like ‘along-English’ in Russian.)

But, English also has a habit of forming piles of new idiomatic phrases, with completely different meaning, by adding postpositions, in the same entirely arbitrary way―which makes learning these phrases an ordeal.

Re: German for Programmers

#12

Post by bayesian_horse » Fri, Feb 08, 2019, 2:15 AM UTC

Tip for remembering if a noun is male, female or neuter, visualize it as burning/being burnt/blowing up for coding female and freezing for coding male. Of course you can reverse the system if you prefer.

Also in my experience, reading text eventually is the most efficient way to learn a language, including the grammatical pecularities. If you come upon the phrase "das kalte Bier", you know that it is "das Bier".

At the beginning of learning a language, reading texts is too slow. In that phase, memorizing and practicing vocabulary or short translations (like Duolingo, which I can wholeheartedly recommend) are a good start.

In my experience, especially from learning English, it's a good idea to not look up every unknown word when reading. You quickly develop a sense of which words or grammatical concepts are important for the meaning of a sentence. If you see a new word in different contexts a few times, you may get curious enough to look it up. Or you already have a sense of its meaning.

Re: German for Programmers

#13

Post by bayesian_horse » Fri, Feb 08, 2019, 2:22 AM UTC

gammateam wrote: post #7

Good 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…

I would recommend starting with something like Duolingo. It will give you a head start on listening comprehension and grammar.

In my opinion, reading texts is more efficient than listening to conversations. It's basically "on demand language streaming", you can slow down or speed up as desired.

Re: German for Programmers

#14

Post by DennisP » Fri, Feb 08, 2019, 2:34 AM UTC

A somewhat related article is Japanese for Nerds, which among other things provides a Backus-Naur form for Japanese grammar.

http://atdt.freeshell.org/k5/story_2004_3_25_32218_1824.html

Sadly Kuro5hin is defunct and google only pulls up an archive of part II...the link to part I is broken and I'm not sure whether the promised third part was ever posted.

Re: German for Programmers

#15

Post by gammateam » Fri, Feb 08, 2019, 2:45 AM UTC

bayesian_horse wrote: post #13

gammateam wrote: post #7

Good 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…

I would recommend starting with something like Duolingo. It will give you a head start on listening comprehension and grammar. In my opinion, reading texts is more efficient than listening to conversations. It's basically "on demand language streaming", you can slow down or speed up as desired.

Duolingo and apps like it, including Memrise, really fail with German. They can be good for syllable pronunciation and maybe memorizing gender of some nouns, but they never will explain or brush on the more complex nuances of any language, which you would learn in the second week of any formal education.

Re: German for Programmers

#16

Post by RightMillennial » Fri, Feb 08, 2019, 3:21 AM UTC

bayesian_horse wrote: post #12

Tip for remembering if a noun is male, female or neuter, visualize it as burning/being burnt/blowing up for coding female and freezing for coding male. Of course you can reverse the system if you prefer. Also in my experience, reading text eventually is the most efficient way to learn a language, including the grammatical pecularities. If you come upon the phrase "das kalte Bier", you know that it is "das Bier". At t…

I took German back in high school but I don't really remember anything about it. How can you read if you don't at least have an idea of what each word or phrase means? I'm a native born English speaker, and I occasionally have to look up English words if I have no idea what they're supposed to mean. It's one thing if it's an obvious random word for a gadget such as doohickey. I can't imagine reading a foreign language and surmising what a word means without a definition.

Re: German for Programmers

#17

Post by kbp » Fri, Feb 08, 2019, 3:55 AM UTC

gammateam wrote: post #15

bayesian_horse wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would recommend starting with something like Duolingo. It will give you a head start on listening comprehension and grammar. In my opinion, reading texts is more efficient than listening to conversations. It's basically "on demand language streaming", you can slow down or speed up as desired.

Duolingo and apps like it, including Memrise, really fail with German. They can be good for syllable pronunciation and maybe memorizing gender of some nouns, but they never will explain or brush on the more complex nuances of any language, which you would learn in the second week of any formal education.

Duolingo has notes explaining the grammar as it introduces it, for the most part, and the grammar gets reasonably sophisticated by the end. Not really what I'd call complex nuances, but probably equivalent to a year or two of university study. What second-week German grammar concepts do you think it doesn't brush on?

Re: German for Programmers

#18

Post by gammateam » Fri, Feb 08, 2019, 4:04 AM UTC

kbp wrote: post #17

gammateam wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Duolingo and apps like it, including Memrise, really fail with German. They can be good for syllable pronunciation and maybe memorizing gender of some nouns, but they never will explain or brush on the more complex nuances of any language, which you would learn in the second week of any formal education.

Duolingo has notes explaining the grammar as it introduces it, for the most part, and the grammar gets reasonably sophisticated by the end. Not really what I'd call complex nuances, but probably equivalent to a year or two of university study. What second-week German grammar concepts do you think it doesn't brush on?

Must have been an update, wasn't familiar with it.

The last duolingo I used was just trying to get humans to solve its foreign-language reCaptcha material.

Re: German for Programmers

#19

Post by reitzensteinm » Fri, Feb 08, 2019, 4:13 AM UTC

gammateam wrote: post #15

bayesian_horse wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would recommend starting with something like Duolingo. It will give you a head start on listening comprehension and grammar. In my opinion, reading texts is more efficient than listening to conversations. It's basically "on demand language streaming", you can slow down or speed up as desired.

Duolingo and apps like it, including Memrise, really fail with German. They can be good for syllable pronunciation and maybe memorizing gender of some nouns, but they never will explain or brush on the more complex nuances of any language, which you would learn in the second week of any formal education.

I agree with that. I banged my head on Duolingo and Memrise for ages before I got a tutor, and things fell in to place within weeks.

Out of disgust for the solutions that existed, I went so far as to start working on my own Memrise style app which understands enough German grammar to generate English/German sentence pairs, so you can practice sentences with nouns/verbs/adjectives swapped around.

So it shows you the first sentence and you translate:

I lay the pen on a table. Ich lege den Stift auf einen Tisch

The pens lay on the table. Die Stifte lagen auf dem Tisch.

Or it shows you a present tense and you make it past:

Ich lese ein Buch. Ich habe ein Buch gelesen.

It was really effective at hammering in the edge cases of grammar (you'd practice maybe 500 sentences an hour). Though I got kicked out of Germany due to visa trouble and life took a different direction, and haven't touched it since!

Re: German for Programmers

#20

Post by repsilat » Fri, Feb 08, 2019, 4:19 AM UTC

aasasd wrote: post #11

> Prepositions claim different areas of ‘cognitive space’ in English and German The thing about pre/postpositions is, their use is almost entirely idiomatic in modern language, i.e. it doesn't follow from the meaning of individual parts and thus doesn't translate without reconstruction. In English, afaict, practically all adpositions signify relations in space or time, plus there are ‘of’ and ‘for.’ However, once you…

Right. In HTTP on TCP over IP?

Speaking "on" English doesn't seem so strange if we can talk over (i.e. through) the radio.

And English gets so much less reasonable. "Put up" is to house, "put down" is to insult, "put up with" is to suffer, "put through" is to test, "put around" is to spread, "put in" to contribute, "put out" to have sex or produce, "put over" either to delay or to decieve, "put past" to offer, "put on" to act or wear or present, "put off" to delay or dissuade, "put away" to tidy or eat or earn, "put aside" to save or to forgive, "put forth" to suggest, "put back" to replace.