German for Programmers • Hacker News Board

Re: German for Programmers

#101

Post by ginko » Fri, Feb 08, 2019, 9:49 AM UTC

EdwardDiego wrote: post #95

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…

I haven't lived in Germany, but I've travelled there for work, and I've found that getting genders wrong confuses Germans. Or at least, German waiters. Also pro-tip - when asking if a sauce is "hot", don't use "heiss" which literally means hot, the word you want is "scharf", spicy. Because "heiss" is slang for "horny" and if you phrase it wrong, you end up asking the Afghani waiter if the sauce is horny, and he looks…

"scharf" can mean horny as well.

Re: German for Programmers

#102

Post by ascar » Fri, Feb 08, 2019, 9:49 AM UTC

onli wrote: post #82

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…

What happens often here is that a word has a clear gender that just feels right to basically all germans. But an alternative gender gets used by a group that does not trust its language feel and instead relies on logic to derive the gender. Blog is a good example: It's obviously "Der Blog", but because some people think "blog is short for weblog, and log is neutral" they use "das Blog", though that just sounds wrong…

Funny enough I always use "der Log" and not das.

Though Das is usually the go to gender for foreign words that don't feel German enough, when you say them in a German sentence. In my experience that feeling largely depends on your expectation to be understood. I.e. mixing German with tech terms with a tech coworker is far more acceptable than mixing it with a coworker from accounting.

Re: German for Programmers

#103

Post by toolslive » Fri, Feb 08, 2019, 9:54 AM UTC

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.

That's not correct. The invented word probably comes from the 'Taalunie'. It might be that the Flemish adhere more to it than the Dutch (I have no statistics)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Language_Union

Re: German for Programmers

#104

Post by jahaja » Fri, Feb 08, 2019, 9:56 AM UTC

hutattedonmyarm wrote: post #90

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…

Native German speaker: Most of the time we think it's just funny if you get the gender wrong, no harm done. As you said, there's very few instances where there are words changing meaning if you swap out the article. And even then, it's ususally obvious from context. (Der Schild => the shield; Das Schild => the sign). I do get the frustration though, I had to learn French in school and I'm currently learning Swedish (…

Since I'm doing the same thing but the other way around I'll trade you Swedish for German if you'd like.

Re: German for Programmers

#105

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Feb 08, 2019, 9:57 AM UTC

alpaca128 wrote: post #66

tobltobs wrote: post #60

A bit offtopic but there [1] is a funny list of some really weird details of the German language. After reading those examples I can not understand how some people are able to learn German at all. [1] https://www.watson.ch/spass/digital/724157644-zum-glueck-mue...

Well, you can do that with every single language out there if you look for the most ridiculous examples. The ones in this link are funny but partially so far-fetched that for one comparison I had to take a look in the dictionary, as a native speaker.

[deleted]

Re: German for Programmers

#106

Post by akvadrako » Fri, Feb 08, 2019, 9:58 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…

This is why Esperanto has je, which can replace any other preposition and remain grammatically correct, albeit more ambiguous.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/je#Esperanto

Re: German for Programmers

#107

Post by donjoe » Fri, Feb 08, 2019, 9:58 AM UTC

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…

Well, sometimes Germans themselves are not quite sure about which article to use. It differs from north to south, from east to west and depends a lot on the dialect you're used to.

An (Upper-)Bavarian would for example never say "die Butter". It is and will always be "der Butter". Same with "der Radio" in the South and "das Radio" for the rest of the country.

Another funny thing I stumble upon every time Oktoberfest starts: Oktoberfest in Munich is referred to as "die Wiesn" (the lawn/grassland). Bavarians don't know an 'e' in the end of a noun, they will therefore always replace it with a 'n'. In the rest of Germany, Wiesn doesn't exist. It's either 'Wiese'(sgl, a single grassland) or 'Wiesen' (pl, many grasslands). Since Wiesen sounds more similar to 'Wiesn' than 'Wiese', even newspapers regularly refer to the Oktoberfest as a multiple of 'Wiese' which - for us - sounds just wrong: "Heute sind wir auf den Wiesn gewesen".

Re: German for Programmers

#108

Post by TomMarius » Fri, Feb 08, 2019, 10:10 AM UTC

lordnacho wrote: post #34

> The genders of individual nouns and the grammatical rules to decline articles and adjectives using those genders constitute a shared set of rules that the sender and receiver both know. It may not approach the Shannon limit, but German gendered nouns form a weird, organically developed forward error correcting code. This might be a convoluted example, but imagine trying to hear the difference between Rat and Rad ov…

Slavic languages have common masculine/feminine suffixes, so it's very easy.

Re: German for Programmers

#109

Post by ImaCake » Fri, Feb 08, 2019, 10:16 AM UTC

donjoe wrote: post #107

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…

Well, sometimes Germans themselves are not quite sure about which article to use. It differs from north to south, from east to west and depends a lot on the dialect you're used to. An (Upper-)Bavarian would for example never say "die Butter". It is and will always be "der Butter". Same with "der Radio" in the South and "das Radio" for the rest of the country. Another funny thing I stumble upon every time Oktoberfest…

I have asked multiple germans about gendered nouns and other funky grammar points. I often end up getting different answers or confusion when I relate what I learnt from a reliable source elsewhere. Honestly, despite the confusion, I love how diverse the German language is despite the relatively small range and number of speakers, but also considering it came under many of the same forces for "flattening" the rules as English did.

Re: German for Programmers

#110

Post by usrusr » Fri, Feb 08, 2019, 10:17 AM UTC

adimitrov wrote: post #47

lordnacho wrote: post #34

> The genders of individual nouns and the grammatical rules to decline articles and adjectives using those genders constitute a shared set of rules that the sender and receiver both know. It may not approach the Shannon limit, but German gendered nouns form a weird, organically developed forward error correcting code. This might be a convoluted example, but imagine trying to hear the difference between Rat and Rad ov…

> 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…

Good examples for some of the different ways gender can be derived.

Going deeper into blog, people who still remember "weblog" as the full form of "blog" will call it "das Blog" (because "das Log" is a well established German term, gendered from "das Logbuch" perhaps), whereas people who were introduced to "blog" when it already felt like a standalone term will tend to use "der Blog", perhaps for to phonetic similarity to "der Block".