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German for Programmers

wickedchicken.github.io

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Re: German for Programmers

#21

Post by gammateam »

reitzensteinm wrote: post #19
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.

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 f…

For me I was content that I could parse what other people were saying. I wanted to know the concepts and how people think, my own ability to synthesize sentences would have been a side effect.

Re: German for Programmers

#22

Post by reitzensteinm »

gammateam wrote: post #21
reitzensteinm wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

For me I was content that I could parse what other people were saying. I wanted to know the concepts and how people think, my own ability to synthesize sentences would have been a side effect.

Sounds like you were further along than I was!

Re: German for Programmers

#24

Post by Baeocystin »

RightMillennial wrote: post #16
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 languag…

I won't say it's easy, but it's easier than you might think.

Word use follows a power law distribution in all languages ( Zipf's Law, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCn8zs912OE is an excellent vsauce cover of the subject ), but the short of it is that within a relatively short amount of time spent studying you'll be able to pick out common words and build from there, even if you started from zero.

Re: German for Programmers

#25

Post by partiallypro »

I've been trying to learn German (at least enough to carry on a light conversation,) so I'm hoping this will help me. I've mostly been learning to speak it, haven't really focused on writing/spelling...though I do understand some basic German grammatical concepts from speaking.

Re: German for Programmers

#26

Post by titanix2 »

DennisP wrote: post #14

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.

> Backus-Naur form for Japanese grammar

For a limited very subset only. The rules presented there are way too easy to handle most natural language statements. That being said the core of Japanese grammar is quite simple for a human learner and the recursion is more obvious there than in most other natural languages.

Re: German for Programmers

#27

Post by aasasd »

badesalz wrote: post #3

About 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…

> All words ending in -chen are neutral. Similarly, “das Bübchen” could refer to a young boy and is also neutral.

Now this actually makes no sense.

Re: German for Programmers

#28

Post by madez »

I like the analogies, but I'd like to nitpick, if I may.

"While the grammar is mostly regular here, two things make this challenging: the nonsensical assignment of genders to nouns and (...)"

The given examples for weird assignment of genders are inadequate because they are explained by common rules.

Das Mädchen: Diminutive words are always neutral, and Mädchen is the diminutive of Magd.

Die Männlichkeit: Words ending on 'keit', 'heit', or 'ung' are always female.

"..., but imagine trying to hear the difference between Rat and Rad over a bad phone line."

It does not make a difference if the phone line is good or bad; the words Rat and Rad are pronounced identical, thanks to the Auslautverhärtung.

Re: German for Programmers

#29

Post by stewbrew »

"Probably the first difficulty people run into when leaning German is memorizing the gender of each noun and properly declining that noun’s articles when used in a sentence."

It really depends on what your mother tongue is.

I personally like the analogies. You can do things differently with language. Some languages use more words to convey some information, others encode the information in the words' gender/declination/position etc.

What makes language really difficult is that languages clash and get mixed up. Imagine a team building a compiler that works with cobol and java code. Imagine the team adapting the codebase to what works best for that new compiler and then slowly deprecating & dropping unused features.

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