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Show HN: Learn German with Short Stories
31–40 of 124 posts
Re: Show HN: Learn German with Short Stories
#32Every week? you need to supply daily assignments at least. You can't learn much with just one study session per week. Maybe you can drop down to 5 days per week (weekends off), but the more you study the faster you will learn.
Ha nice idea! Perhaps I can make it configurable like you are saying!
Re: Show HN: Learn German with Short Stories
#33Personally I found German texts on the Kindle invaluable, with the auto dictionary lookup.
Erich Kaestner and Hans Fallada were my favourites as they used an easy/journalistic style.
Re: Show HN: Learn German with Short Stories
#34Native German speaker here. My partner is a native English speaker and I was about to recommend this to her. However, it looks like a lot of this is auto generated/translated, making it sound unnatural or sometimes just wrong. For example: I looked at this example story [1] and the practice question is slightly bad grammar. It should be "Wer ging im Wald spazieren?", not "Wer ging spazieren im Wald?". Or: "Sie lachte…
I think this can be solved through asking the LLM to improve the output itself. I asked GPT-4 to "provide more idiomatic and grammatically correct versions. Consider whether each phrase sounds like German," and got the following output:
Wer ging im Wald spazieren?
Max war sehr dankbar für Lisas Hilfe und lud sie zum Eisessen ein. Sie gingen zu einer nahegelegenen Eisdiele und verbrachten den restlichen Tag zusammen. Sie lachten und hatten eine schöne Zeit, als ob sie sich schon lange gekannt hätten.
@cloogsicer: is "eine schöne Zeit" more acceptable? The rest?
Re: Show HN: Learn German with Short Stories
#35There's a mistake in the first paragraph of the story i checked:
Heute, viele Jahre später, hatte er seine eigene kleine Fischerboote
kleinen
Re: Show HN: Learn German with Short Stories
#36Native German speaker here. My partner is a native English speaker and I was about to recommend this to her. However, it looks like a lot of this is auto generated/translated, making it sound unnatural or sometimes just wrong. For example: I looked at this example story [1] and the practice question is slightly bad grammar. It should be "Wer ging im Wald spazieren?", not "Wer ging spazieren im Wald?". Or: "Sie lachte…
I think this can be solved through asking the LLM to improve the output itself. I asked GPT-4 to "provide more idiomatic and grammatically correct versions. Consider whether each phrase sounds like German," and got the following output: Wer ging im Wald spazieren? Max war sehr dankbar für Lisas Hilfe und lud sie zum Eisessen ein. Sie gingen zu einer nahegelegenen Eisdiele und verbrachten den restlichen Tag zusammen.…
I tried the first paragraph, too. Seems to have made several idiomatic improvements:
Es war ein sonniger Tag im Wald und ein Mädchen namens Lisa ging spazieren. Sie hörte plötzlich ein Geräusch und drehte sich um. Sie sah einen Jungen namens Max, der in Schwierigkeiten war. Er hatte sich verlaufen und wusste nicht, wie er zurück zum Parkplatz kommen sollte. Lisa entschied sich, ihm zu helfen und sie begannen gemeinsam den Weg zurück zu suchen.
-->
Es war ein sonniger Tag im Wald, und ein Mädchen namens Lisa ging spazieren. Plötzlich hörte sie ein Geräusch und drehte sich um. Sie sah einen Jungen namens Max, der in Schwierigkeiten steckte. Er hatte sich verirrt und wusste nicht, wie er zum Parkplatz zurückkommen sollte. Lisa beschloss, ihm zu helfen, und gemeinsam suchten sie den Weg zurück.
Re: Show HN: Learn German with Short Stories
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yea, I can definitely improve that! That sounds like better way to do it. Thanks!
Or, ask an LLM to give glosses. You can tap to get a gloss in English. (Or other languages later.) GPT-3.5 is already very good at sense disambiguation
GPT-4 Prompt: Please assist with providing English glosses for a German text. For phrases which are not easily interpreted word-for-word, please provide a gloss for the whole phrase. Otherwise, provide a gloss for each word. You may output the glosses as a list, one gloss per line, german on left, followed by an arrow (-->), and then the english gloss.
Here's some of the output:
Es --> It
war --> was
ein --> a
sonniger --> sunny
Tag --> day
im --> in the
Wald --> forest
und --> and
ein --> a
Mädchen --> girl
namens --> named
Lisa --> Lisa
ging --> went
spazieren --> for a walk
Sie --> She
hörte --> heard
plötzlich --> suddenly
ein --> a
Geräusch --> noise
und --> and
drehte --> turned
sich --> herself
um --> around
I was expecting "drehte sich um" to be grouped together, but I'm pleased with the glosses.
Note how "sich" is glossed with "herself". That's understanding the context properly. Much more useful than a dictionary definition of "sich". Similar for "sonniger" which Google translated as "sunnier" out of context.
EDIT: Note that GPT-3.5 gave me exactly the same glosses.
Re: Show HN: Learn German with Short Stories
#38I taught myself some German by translating Die Bruders Grimm stories word by word, writing between the lines. Combined with other learning sources it seemed to work okay.
Re: Show HN: Learn German with Short Stories
#39There's a mistake in the first paragraph of the story i checked: Heute, viele Jahre später, hatte er seine eigene kleine Fischerboote kleinen
eigenen kleinen
Re: Show HN: Learn German with Short Stories
#40I taught myself some German by translating Die Bruders Grimm stories word by word, writing between the lines. Combined with other learning sources it seemed to work okay.
“Die Brüder Grimm” ;)
A lot of those stories aren’t written in contemporary German and would sound very weird if you used it in your day to day language.