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Show HN: Learn German with Short Stories

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61–70 of 124 posts

Re: Show HN: Learn German with Short Stories

#61

Native 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…

TornadoGuard: https://xkcd.com/937/

Re: Show HN: Learn German with Short Stories

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems silly to translate short stories into German, rather than just using German short stories. Even if translation got incredibly good, the "real" German stories would have the extra benefit of teaching you about the culture. On that note, do you have a recommendation for a collection of actual German short stories?

Der Struwwelpeter

Excellent recommendation. I always use that book to explain to people how I grew up very differently from folks in the US (where I now live).

English: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24571

German: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24571/24571-h/24571-h.htm

Re: Show HN: Learn German with Short Stories

#64

I am experiencing an issue where if you click a word to get translation, a new Google search with 'translate "war" to english' opens. The problem is that it doesn't try to translate from German. Instead it translates the English word 'war' to Latin for some reason. I think a better search keyword is 'translate "war" from german to english'

You are right, that would be better, I will improve the search query. Also I'll try to have that on the actual page so that it's a better experience. Thanks for the feedback.

Re: Show HN: Learn German with Short Stories

#65
post #60

I am experiencing an issue where if you click a word to get translation, a new Google search with 'translate "war" to english' opens. The problem is that it doesn't try to translate from German. Instead it translates the English word 'war' to Latin for some reason. I think a better search keyword is 'translate "war" from german to english'

Experiencing the same issue. Google is falling apart. It's choosing English as the source language with queries like this, and destination is any language which you may have used recently with translate. A note to the OP: translate "Fischerboote" to english - doesn't work translate "Fischerboote" from german - works

Yep you are totally right, will make those changes and maybe try to have the translation on the same page! Thanks for the feedback!

Re: Show HN: Learn German with Short Stories

#67
post #52

I struggled with German in middle school because it was the only foreign language available there and I wanted to hone my English instead. Ultimately what helped me to pass were dubbed animated series like The Simpsons. Live action stuff usually had too much background noise for me to follow properly.

Hopefully we can add something closer to that experience at some point too.

Re: Show HN: Learn German with Short Stories

#68
post #56

Clicking on the words launches new tabs/windows into Google for translation. Very annoying. sending me to Google as a search link is super annoying. Some words (e.g., war, Tag, um) are not only in German, so the translations can be confusing. Translation can be done prior to displaying the story, and make the words appear as hover boxes, and even provide more language context. The example story is asking me to log in…

I had exactly the same thought about the new tab. Kindles and OSX devices (among others) can already give an intrusive popup with a translation or definition. I'm an intermediate German speaker and even to me the language in the example story felt weird. I'm totally into the idea, and if the usability was better I'd probably use the site despite the non-idiomatic text.

Thanks @WaitWaitWha and @y_y! I definitely want to improve that and have the translations on the same page! Hopefully very soon :) thanks for trying it out.
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