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German for Programmers

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Re: German for Programmers

#111

Post by maljx »

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 (…

In case no one told you "en" words usually map to masculine and feminine in German, and "ett" words are neutral.

Re: German for Programmers

#112

Post by [deleted] »

ascar wrote: post #91
pluma wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It also shifts with time. 30 years back the prejudice would have been flipped. As a white immigrant you would've probably been a low educated russian or polish worker, while with a taint you would've been Italian and much more respected. It's the general bad practice of putting individuals into larger groups with a stigma based on visual appearance. I think a lot of the resentment about bad German skills in my genera…

[deleted]

Re: German for Programmers

#113

Post by glastra »

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…

A funny thing is that, in Castilian (Spanish spoken in Spain), the word "Internet" is always used without an article.

We do assign the masculine gender to it when we attach adjectives to it, but never an article, which actually is a bit strange once you think about it.

For example, "the Internet is full of X" is "Internet está lleno de X". To refer to a slow Internet connection, we would say "Internet va lento" or "me va lento Internet". No trace of "el Internet".

Also, I think in Latin America they treat it as feminine and always attach the definitive article, so "the Internet" is "la Internet".

And as a last comment, just to see how crazy language is, we always use "la intranet". Maybe because that is a "concrete" place, while the Internet is a more abstract medium.

Re: German for Programmers

#114

Post by pjmlp »

Treegarden wrote: post #99
usrusr wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 litt…

Man, as a native German I hate this obsession with german naming english words. Disruptive becomes "erschütternd" which is a bad translation, or how do you translate "tech-stack"? Technologie Haufen? I solve this by speaking denglish, but sometimes my fellow Germans who are less into the tech lingo complain about that. I really hate it when germans try to germanize international english words.

I find quite funny how my German collegues get lost when their beloved IDE happens to be configured by IT for German.

They spend large minutes looking for where everything has gone.

And the beauty of trying to understand what log messages in German actually mean.

Re: German for Programmers

#115

Post by ArmandGrillet »

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…

Could you share how you've learned to speak German during those 3 years? I have used all the common apps to learn German and reached an A2 level but going to B1/B2 is harder to achieve using only apps. Thanks!

Re: German for Programmers

#116

Post by pjmlp »

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".

And sometimes both countries come up with totally unrelated terms to the original one.

Spreadsheet => Folha de cálculo (Portugal), Planilha Electrônica (Brasil)

Re: German for Programmers

#117

Post by gurkendoktor »

usrusr wrote: post #80
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 litt…

> You say it exactly as you wrote

...except that you still need to memorize or deduce the correct articles. Der Layer (ends in -er); die VM (die (virtuelle) Maschine); die Postgres-Database (die (Daten-)Bank); das Upgrade (probably because it's a verb turned into a noun, like das Aktualisieren?), etc. Fun!

For some reason, many recent open source tools are still translated into German word by word. I guess the volunteer translators feel like they're cheating when they use English terms?

Re: German for Programmers

#118

Post by aasasd »

akvadrako wrote: post #106
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

I wonder if Lojban or any of similar languages have taken a stance against this encroachment of old physical descriptors on newer abstract meanings. Though I guess it's impossible to foresee what kinds of relations will need to be denoted in the future.

Re: German for Programmers

#119

Post by simias »

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…

>Unlike French, there are very few words where changing the gender has a different meaning

Being French myself I'm curious what makes you say that. I can't think of many nouns that change meaning if you swap their gender. They exist but I never thought that it was common enough to cause issues. For the most part I can understand strangers just fine even if get the genders wrong. "J'ai mis la téléphone dans le voiture qui est garé devant le maison" sounds obviously broken but absolutely unambiguous.

Also, French having only two genders means that you'll get it right at least half the time if you guess randomly, while in German you'd only have a 1/3 success rate, so there's that...

>I agree absolutely with not trying to map German propositions to English ones.

That's definitely true and it's not just with English German unfortunately, it's true with every language I've studied. Even among Romance languages there are significant differences (for instance "to dream of" is "rêver de" in French but "sonhar em/com" in Portuguese, and then there's the whole "por/para" distinction that doesn't really exist in French). Similarly I'm currently trying to learn Russian and that's one of many difficulties with the language (made even worse because you need to learn the right preposition but also what case it calls for).

Re: German for Programmers

#120

Post by aasasd »

contradictioned wrote: post #38
aasasd wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

As someone else commented, > Diminutive words are always neutral And there is "die Magd", ancient expression for a young woman and the grammatical gender is female, as well as "der Bube", ancient expression (it is still used more often, though) for a young man and grammatical gender is male. Of both these words you can create the diminished versions "Bübchen" and "Mädchen" which both follow the aforementioned rule an…

My objection is not to the formulation of the rule, but to the existence of the rule―because where I'm from, a little girl is still a girl, grammatically too.

(Even though I agree in general that little kids make crappy men and women.)

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