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German for Programmers

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Re: German for Programmers

#151

Post by tom_mellior »

madez wrote: post #139
floqqi wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a native speaker: Generally no, but it depends. The "t" in "Rat" is pronounced much harder than the "d" in "Rad" is. BUT: The more and more you go into the north of Germany, lets say Hamburg for example, they have a very similar pronouncing of "t" and "d". Both often sound very hard (more like an "t"). Whereas people in the south tend to pronounce both letters more soft, like a "d". But in general they are pronoun…

in standard high German, which you'll find for example in Hanover, Rad and Rat are phonetically completely identical. In dialects they may be pronounced differently.

Please don't use "High German" in English to mean (some perceived) "Standard German". It's bad (and incorrect) enough to use "Hochdeutsch" in German, but "High German" has a specific meaning in English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_languages and the dialect spoken in Hannover is not in fact a High German one.

Re: German for Programmers

#152

Post by madez »

thecatspaw wrote: post #89
badestrand wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you can easily construct other examples, e.g. "Ich trete meine Rechte, die ich, Gott sei Dank, habe, ab."

As a german speaker this strikes me as wrong. I personally would have written that as "Ich trete meine Rechte, die ich Gott sei Dank habe, ab", or simplified as "Ich trete meine Rechte ab, die ich Gott sei Dank habe"

It doesn't strike me as wrong, just as a bit unhandy. The explanatory Nebensatz that is started with a relative pronoun that refers to the object that is about to be explained can always start directly after the object, and sometimes even must start there. For example:

Seine Meinung, die ich nicht teile, macht weniger Sinn als ihre.

Re: German for Programmers

#153

Post by [deleted] »

tom_mellior wrote: post #151
madez wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in standard high German, which you'll find for example in Hanover, Rad and Rat are phonetically completely identical. In dialects they may be pronounced differently.

Please don't use "High German" in English to mean (some perceived) "Standard German". It's bad (and incorrect) enough to use "Hochdeutsch" in German, but "High German" has a specific meaning in English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_languages and the dialect spoken in Hannover is not in fact a High German one.

[deleted]

Re: German for Programmers

#154

Post by madez »

tom_mellior wrote: post #151
madez wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in standard high German, which you'll find for example in Hanover, Rad and Rat are phonetically completely identical. In dialects they may be pronounced differently.

Please don't use "High German" in English to mean (some perceived) "Standard German". It's bad (and incorrect) enough to use "Hochdeutsch" in German, but "High German" has a specific meaning in English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_languages and the dialect spoken in Hannover is not in fact a High German one.

Wikipedia calls it Standard (High) German. To be more specific, I meant German Standard High German.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_German

Re: German for Programmers

#155

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: German for Programmers

#156

Post by madez »

graup wrote: post #96
levosmetalo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. People will understand you, but they will also judge you. In my experience, Germans are much more ready to notice "wrong German" than English speakers do with "wrong English". This is just a sad fact. My aunt, an American who has lived in German-speaking countries for 10+ years and can say almost everything she'd want to tells me she still gets treated less seriously because of subtle mistakes like that in h…

My experience is that after some time and level of proficiency in a language, some just stop learning and caring. I think that is a pity because I believe that with revisiting the rules in interesting exercises one can fix the mistakes even later.

It may help your Aunt to learn German (again) with beginners books. There are good self-learner books with interesting exercises. They are less than 20€ per level and if you are already good, it should be easy to do multiple pages per hour.

It would be important for a native speaker to check the answers, though. And also the solutions should be crosschecked with the books solutions, if there are any, because many Germans don't know all the rules correctly. If in doubt, just stick with the book.

Re: German for Programmers

#157

Post by pelasaco »

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.

not true, unless you are racist. Some words change their gender depending on the region. Like Radio, Cola, Butter, Bretzel, Kaugummi etc.. they are called "Substantiven mit schwankendem Genus"

Re: German for Programmers

#158

Post by close04 »

datdata wrote: post #132
simias wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

What about if I say 'J'ai mis la téléphone dans la peau" instead of 'j'ai mis le téléphone dans le pot"?! I find in french that there is always another meaning behind a noun and it is easy to slip up.

But that's using a whole different noun, albeit one that sounds similar. In this case using the correct gender won't help, especially if the sentence could make sense with both nouns.

Re: German for Programmers

#159

Post by madez »

ImaCake wrote: post #109
donjoe wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Being a native speaker does not imply knowing the rules.

Re: German for Programmers

#160

Post by usrusr »

adimitrov wrote: post #75
ascar wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Kitchen terms are generally crazy. Do other languages also have hundreds of different terms for the last piece of a loaf of bread that is too thin for further slicing, but too thick to be considered a slice?
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