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German for Programmers

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Re: German for Programmers

#141

Post by BoppreH »

simias wrote: post #119
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…

Not sure what you mean about "sonhar em/com". In this case em" is used to depict the medium, while "com" regards the subject. For example, "sonhar em alemão" means "to dream in German" (e.g. everyone talks in German), while "sonhar com alemão" means "to dream about German" (e.g. you dreamed you were in class).

Re: German for Programmers

#142

Post by Spearchucker »

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…

Thank you. For ALL the comments here! The message is clear - I'm overthinking this. Really appreciate you all taking the time to reply!!

Re: German for Programmers

#143

Post by wolfgke »

amaccuish wrote: post #6
qwerty456127 wrote: post #5

The thing I and many other people hate the most in any language that has it (German included) are cases. The rest is easy.

Personally love them. Not so much in German, but in Russian they make word order wonderfully flexible. You can just blurt stuff out, adjusting the case as you go along, to build a sentence, rather than having to go back and restart. What bugs me with German inability to reliably form plurals and having adjective endings vary by determiner (though not difficult to learn, but just seemingly serving no useful purpose).…

> What bugs me with German inability to reliably form plurals

As a native German speaker, this is one of the few complaints about the German language that I can relive. This is really ugly.

Re: German for Programmers

#144

Post by madez »

Tomte wrote: post #68
pantalaimon wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the words Rat and Rad are pronounced identical, thanks to the Auslautverhärtung. Are they though? > Ich habe einen Rat für dich. > Ich habe ein Rad für dich.

Yes, they are pronounced identically. I couldn't believe it. Neither could my fellow students in Phonetics and Phonology. But the spectrogram doesn't lie. Looks exactly the same.

Why is it difficult to believe that there are phonetic collisions? There are even lexical collisions with _different_ phonetics like in Weg vs weg.

The rules behind the shift in pronunciation can be looked up by searching for Auslautverhärtung. Isn't this A1-level German?

Re: German for Programmers

#145

Post by mhd »

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…

It’s even more complicated, as even Bavarians use the articles by context, using the proper one when speaking standard German and the variation when using dialect. Alas, not everyone has the same level of dialect, especially in Munich, so you can hear both even when Bavarian is in use.

As for the plurals, the -e suffix can often both be left out and replaced with an n, so you have two singular forms for some words.

But again, without the dialect it won’t work. As the GP said, you’ll still be understood, though. As with most languages, a lot of parts are superfluous and can be determined by context.

Re: German for Programmers

#146

Post by wolfgke »

onli wrote: post #138
wolfgke wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oh and "Das Logbuch" has nothing to do with "log" but everything with "Buch". "das Log" is a device for measuring the speed of vessels: > https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Log_(Messger%C3%A... So of course a "Logbuch" has a lot to do with a "Log".

Not with the gender of the word. The last noun counts.

> Not with the gender of the word. The last noun counts.

OK, then I misunderstood - you were talking about this elementary grammatical rule and I was talking about the origin of the word "Logbuch" (the latter is something that even many native German speakers do not know).

Re: German for Programmers

#147

Post by Spearchucker »

gurkendoktor wrote: post #117
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…

> 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 volunt…

Thanks for that and yes you're right. I think this isn't so critical though. My (French) girlfriend speaks German, with terrible grammar - but people understand her. I wish my French was as good...

I couldn't care less about the correct article (although I mostly guess correctly anyway). I think being understood is the real winner. As is seeking to understand, of course.

Re: German for Programmers

#148

Post by FabHK »

wolfgke wrote: post #131
mk89 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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....

> 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.... Native German speaker here: I disagree with all the sentiment of "less fear". Better concentrate on your ability to formulate grammatically correct sentences. In school, I often felt that the German grammar works somewhat like a mathematical proof system (and asked myself why German grammar i…

Funny thing though is that most native speakers (of any language) generally don't know the grammar explicitly. They know it implicitly insofar as they speak correctly, but they'll generally be hard pressed to explain why they say things the way they say them.

Re: German for Programmers

#149

Post by mvindahl »

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…

In my experience, not having German as my first language, you can get pretty far with guesses and rules of thumb as far as the genders are concerned. With experience your guesses will become more educated. You will start to feel the patterns in how the ending of a word maps to the gender of the noun, with some accuracy. You'll memorize some of the most common exceptions. "Impossible" delineations such as "mit das [..]" will feel wrong.

Also, by all means, memorize the delineation tables and the rotes that will help you identify accusative and dative. I still remember those from school and they never cease to be useful.

Oh, and by the way, it turns out that Polish is even worse in terms of grammar .. or maybe my mind is just less pliable these days :)

Re: German for Programmers

#150

Post by jrnvs »

pikzel wrote: post #129
maljx wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

As a native Swedish speaker, albeit with little interest in languages and grammar, I can't see how that would help anyone. How do you know if "bil" (car) is masculine/feminine or neutral (en bil, ett bil)? Open to learn here :)

It helps because words describing a profession, a person or something animate are usually male/female. The same goes in Dutch, where "de" refers to male/female and "het" to neutrum.

There are several rules of thumbs which can help foreigners to correctly guess the article in both Swedish and Dutch. Of couse, they'll only be an accurate guess at best, but they can give you a headstart as a novice learner.

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