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German for Programmers

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Re: German for Programmers

#71

Post by mk89 »

levosmetalo wrote: post #67
jlangenauer wrote: post #65

Having lived in Germany for 3 years now, and managed to speak German to a half-decent level (B1/B2), I offer the following observations. 1. The genders don't matter nearly as much as non-speakers think they do. If you talk to your bank, it doesn't matter if you ask about "der Konto", "die Konto" or "das Konto" (the last is actually correct), you will be able to communicate quite fine. Unlike French, there are very fe…

While it's true that people that want to understand you would understand you, even if you speak wrong, it's not something "not to worry about". Using the wrong gender or articles quickly gives a hint that you are some lowly educated factory worker living in Germany for 20 years and not caring to learn the language.

I agree.

Probably it's good to know that it doesn't matter, just so that you feel less fearful and tend to speak more, even wrong....

Re: German for Programmers

#72

Post by t0astbread »

Spearchucker wrote: post #40

Got excited when I read the title but. I speak fluent German - like a native. Only after 20 years in London I cannot participate in a hard- or software-related technical discussion in German, because I wasn't exposed to that milieu in a German-speaking environment. And so I excpected something that maybe explains how you might say "inversion of control" or "edge/perimiter network" or "public key cryptography" or "tie…

I'm a software engineering student in Austria and have interned at multiple companies and we always just used the respective English terms.

Actually, I've noticed that I sometimes just use English words mixed with German in my day-to-day talking too because they come to mind more quickly. Probably ~10% of what I say when talking German is English (with German grammar of course).

Re: German for Programmers

#73

Post by radicalbyte »

swah wrote: post #63
pantalaimon wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just use the English words like everyone else. It seems like there was an effort in the 80ies/90ies to have native German names for concepts in computer science, but today those just sound very dated. Datenfernübertragung died with the 56k Modem ;)

This happens in Portugal vs Brazil. Portuguese have native terms ("mouse" is "rato") and Brazilians just import everything "mouse", "celular", "desktop".

Dutch vs Flemish is the same. The dutch use the English word and the Flemish make their own word.

Re: German for Programmers

#74

Post by jlangenauer »

levosmetalo wrote: post #67
jlangenauer wrote: post #65

Having lived in Germany for 3 years now, and managed to speak German to a half-decent level (B1/B2), I offer the following observations. 1. The genders don't matter nearly as much as non-speakers think they do. If you talk to your bank, it doesn't matter if you ask about "der Konto", "die Konto" or "das Konto" (the last is actually correct), you will be able to communicate quite fine. Unlike French, there are very fe…

While it's true that people that want to understand you would understand you, even if you speak wrong, it's not something "not to worry about". Using the wrong gender or articles quickly gives a hint that you are some lowly educated factory worker living in Germany for 20 years and not caring to learn the language.

Yes, but I find that you fill in the blanks as you use and are exposed to German.

Re: German for Programmers

#75

Post by adimitrov »

ascar wrote: post #69
adimitrov wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Somehow, they tend to all place the noun in the same gender. That's not generally true, especially for German. I've heard "der Blog, das Blog," "die, das Email" "die, der, das Factory" … etc. Loan words undergo an integration process, which is more of a sociolinguistic concept, I guess. At the end of the integration process, the word becomes an integral part of the language, with a fixed gender. For example, "Manag…

Some words are also officially recognized with different genders. E.g. it's "der oder das Ketchup". [1] I argued multiple times with my girlfriend that "der Ketchup" doesn't sound right at all, until we looked it up. My best guess is this comes from different dialects that associate different genders with certain sounds. She comes from Schwaben, while I'm from Franken, which speak very different dialects. I had never…

It doesn't have to be recent English loan words for German dialects to make things weird.

http://www.atlas-alltagssprache.de/runde-5/f15a-f/

(fyi: Butter is a loanword from Greek. I've heard "das Butter" as well.)

Re: German for Programmers

#76

Post by Sharlin »

repsilat wrote: post #20
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…

Yeah, phrasal verbs (verb-particle combinations) are almost entirely idiomatic. At least as a non-native learner, I've found it best to memorize them as units and not to even think about what the adposition would mean affixed to a noun, and that's how they were taught as well.

Re: German for Programmers

#77

Post by kayoone »

Spearchucker wrote: post #40

Got excited when I read the title but. I speak fluent German - like a native. Only after 20 years in London I cannot participate in a hard- or software-related technical discussion in German, because I wasn't exposed to that milieu in a German-speaking environment. And so I excpected something that maybe explains how you might say "inversion of control" or "edge/perimiter network" or "public key cryptography" or "tie…

I am German living in Germany, but for the last 5 years all my work/professional live is english and I also have small word finding problems when talking about the same concepts in german, just because I usually never do it.

Re: German for Programmers

#78

Post by [deleted] »

radicalbyte wrote: post #73
swah wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happens in Portugal vs Brazil. Portuguese have native terms ("mouse" is "rato") and Brazilians just import everything "mouse", "celular", "desktop".

Dutch vs Flemish is the same. The dutch use the English word and the Flemish make their own word.

[deleted]

Re: German for Programmers

#79

Post by pluma »

levosmetalo wrote: post #67
jlangenauer wrote: post #65

Having lived in Germany for 3 years now, and managed to speak German to a half-decent level (B1/B2), I offer the following observations. 1. The genders don't matter nearly as much as non-speakers think they do. If you talk to your bank, it doesn't matter if you ask about "der Konto", "die Konto" or "das Konto" (the last is actually correct), you will be able to communicate quite fine. Unlike French, there are very fe…

While it's true that people that want to understand you would understand you, even if you speak wrong, it's not something "not to worry about". Using the wrong gender or articles quickly gives a hint that you are some lowly educated factory worker living in Germany for 20 years and not caring to learn the language.

That's true but I'd say it's less about appearing lowly educated than about reinforcing your foreign-ness.

A lot of Germans are to varying degrees prejudiced against foreigners, especially if you're brown or can be read as Turkish/Arabic or Eastern European. If you pass as white European you're more likely to be read as educated but still learning the language whereas otherwise your language problems are more likely to be attributed to a general lack of intelligence and education.

I'm not saying all Germans think this but there are certain cultural clichés around uneducated "southerners" (generally Italy, Greece, Turkey but also Arabs and everything West of France) and Eastern Europeans speaking broken German the same way Americans have stereotypes about people speaking AAVE.

In other words broken German has a cultural stigma but depending on how you are read you may be less impacted by it. If your career is going to involve speaking German a lot, it's probably advantageous to speak it well.

Re: German for Programmers

#80

Post by usrusr »

Spearchucker wrote: post #40

Got excited when I read the title but. I speak fluent German - like a native. Only after 20 years in London I cannot participate in a hard- or software-related technical discussion in German, because I wasn't exposed to that milieu in a German-speaking environment. And so I excpected something that maybe explains how you might say "inversion of control" or "edge/perimiter network" or "public key cryptography" or "tie…

You say it exactly as you wrote, thankfully we have stopped translating that kind of term. Translations are only found at the extreme edges of the formality spectrum: in very formal writing, you use whatever is defined in the glossary of your organisation, and informal chitchat might occasionally be spiced up with ridiculous translations spontaneously made up on the spot.

Even when I was a child, with no or very little education in English under my belt, the chapter "E/A-Anweisungen" in my trusty GW-BASIC manual confused me to no end. I'm pretty sure that I would have grasped the meaning of "IO".

Where those terms still rule unchallenged is in MS Excel formulas. All the function names are translated. When you are a native speaker but used to programming vocabulary, Excel expressions read like hieroglyphics: you can easily identify most of the symbols, but the semantics remain unknown.

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