German for Programmers
wickedchicken.github.io
wickedchicken.github.io
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 few words where changing the gender has a different meaning - das Bund/der Bund (the bundle/the association) is the only one I can think of off-hand. Same with adjective declinations - "das verbundenes Konto", "zum verbundene Konto", "ein verbundenen Konto" are all wrong and will grate on the German ear, but will all be understood.
2. I agree absolutely with not trying to map German propositions to English ones. One of the things that improved my German a lot is learning the verb + proposition combinations - "ich denke an...", "ich freue mich auf...", "ich helfe dir bei ..."
3. There is an amazing amount of structure in German words which you start to see after you have basic vocabulary, which makes it easier to guess at the meaning of words you've never come across before. For example: das Mitleid - "mit" means with, and "leid" would be related to the verb "leiden", to suffer. So you'd have "with-suffering", which makes it possible to guess the actual meaning - "compassion" or "pity". This of course gets extended far further with German's compound words.
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.
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 is not part of math classes). When studying mathematics, you first have to learn to write correct proofs. It makes no sense to try learn something more deep in mathematics if you have difficulties writing elementary proofs.
For German, it is the same: first learn the internal structure (grammar) of the language (just like predicate logic in mathematics) and just like thinking how to express something that you want to prove in predicate logic, find out how to formulate something in German's grammatical structure.
Only after this elementary step, you can begin with more complicated things.
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 to be attributed to a general lack of intelligence and education.
I'm not saying all Germans think this but there are certain cultural clichés around uneducated "southerners" (generally Italy, Greece, Turkey but also Arabs and everything West of France) and Eastern Europeans speaking broken German the same way Americans have stereotypes about people speaking AAVE.
In other words broken German has a cultural stigma but depending on how you are read you may be less impacted by it. If your career is going to involve speaking German a lot, it's probably advantageous to speak it well.
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 generation (80s/90s) comes from 10+ year residents and 2nd generation immigrants not capable of speaking our language correctly.
There are reasons of course, just sayin'.
Doing so while not allowing them is cruel and stupid like punching someone for having a black eye and justifying it with their face looking weird.
There is the option to leave the country.
It doesn't sound entirely unreasonable or unfair to me.
We also had a lot of highly educated migrants from Yugoslavia back in the seventies and they were appreciated back then. But after the Balkan wars they were suddenly the bad guys despite some of them being perfectly integrated in our society and sometimes being the third generation to live here.
It's funny how fast the perception shifts and how quickly we are to judge on the prejudices we have of a group of people and not on the individual.
"Hedonistic lazy people with dark hair who steal our daughters" seems to be the general idea. This is somewhat distinct from "lazy people with light hair who steal our things", which seems to be the stereotype against Eastern Europeans.
Eastern Europeans are very much white. Their accent might give them away but certainly not the skin complexion.
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 her speech.
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.
I also agree about mapping the prepositions, but I think that applies to learning other languages in general, or at elast, more than just the pairing German/English. I can only compare it to English => Swedish (I had not interest in learning French as a language, I was more trying to get a passing grade in it. And I do have to learn Swedish from the English perspective, because Duolongo doesn't offer a German => Swedish course), but it's the same thing
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.
En and ett words actually are genders (or "genus"), they are known as utrum and neutrum respectively.
After 2 years I just stopped worrying about articles, knowing that I would anyway always sound like auslander to them.
Also pro-tip - when asking if a sauce is "hot", don't use "heiss" which literally means hot, the word you want is "scharf", spicy. Because "heiss" is slang for "horny" and if you phrase it wrong, you end up asking the Afghani waiter if the sauce is horny, and he looks a little aghast.
I agree with point 3 though, German makes a lot of sense when you learn how the words combine together.
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 starts: Oktoberfest in Munich is referred to as "die Wiesn" (the lawn/grassland). Bavarians don't know an 'e' in the end of a noun, they will therefore always replace it with a 'n'. In the rest of Germany, Wiesn doesn't exist. It's either 'Wiese'(sgl, a single grassland) or 'Wiesen' (pl, many grasslands). Since Wiesen sounds more similar to 'Wiesn' than 'Wiese', even newspapers regularly refer to the Oktoberfest as a multiple of 'Wiese' which - for us - sounds just wrong: "Heute sind wir auf den Wiesn gewesen".
(And then there are Platt (= Low German) and Alemannisch/Schwyzerdütsch, both of which are distinct languages from High German.)
Nonsense. If a native speaker uses a form and thinks it's correct, it by definition is.
Another gem is that in my local dialect the word for foot (Fuß) has an extended meaning and denotes the body part of foot and leg. There basically is not a separate word for leg (well there is but it's standard German not dialect). The standard German word for leg is "bein". Now Bein has a common ancestor with a similar word in English "bone", and indeed the dialectal version of Bein in my dialect is the word for bone. (To me that indicates that the word has made a meaning change in standard German).
Now if I don't think hard (or if I am tired) I will call my leg "foot" in English, which confuses everyone.
Probably in German both meanings were used alongside for a while and then folks started to attach a "ge-" in front of one meaning to avoid confusion.
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.
For example Blog. Correct would be "das Blog" (because "das Web-Log" = "das Logbuch" or "das Protokoll"), but "der Blog" sounds nicer imho. Some people say "das Laptop" although this sounds off for most and "der Laptop" is correct.
For other words, the article can change over time. Correct is "das Virus", because it's a Latin word and the ending -us comes with "das". But most people say (and the media writes) "der Virus".
No. If something sounds right to a native speaker, it's correct.
(A better example is “Mus”, which has multiple correct genders.)
German is a lot more prescriptive than English. This is only different for neologisms and anglicisms (“Newsletter”), where a generally accepted gender hasn’t been established through usage yet (Duden now lists “Newsletter” as masculine, but both “die Newsletter” and “das Newsletter” were common until recently).
Additionally, your explanation about the origin of the gender of “Butter” is entirely apocryphal: the original Greek/Latin gender has at best an indirect influence on the gender of the modern German word (and in fact both were neuter: βούτυρον vs butyrum).
Beyond that, reading books in German, and dealing with German society in German (surprisingly hard to do here in Berlin, as all the locals love to speak English, Jens Spahn excepted). Watch German TV.
I’m also lucky to have a few German friends who tolerate speaking to me in German, despite the fact their English is near fluent.
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).
Clearly if you told me the strictly correct sentence "les téléphones sont dans les pots" I would never wonder if you meant "the phones are in the pots" or "the phones are in the skins" because we don't generally put phones in people's skins (yet).
Also nice is seeing a completely new German word in writing and immediately knowing with nearly 100% confidence how it is pronounced.
Compare that to the unfortunate person learning English, which almost seems deliberately designed to trick you with seemingly arbitrary pronunciations.
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 :)
Everything above 5th grade was reading poems and stuff, which I did great in :)
In Germany the value of high school degrees depends hugely on the state in which you visited school.
That is just the same in English. Although you probably need to remember a bit more etymology, and some Latin doesn't hurt, "compassion" is just the same. "com" means with and "passion" in this context also means suffering.
English uses this "second register" to make words, which makes it harder. German and Dutch do not, they use the regular vocabulary. The classic example is scientific terms like "Carbon", ""hydrogen": In German "Kohlenstoff" and "Wasserstoff". It helps if you realise that "stoff" is stuff, material; "Kohle" is coal and "wasser" is water.
That neither latin nor ancient greek are part of the public education curriculum is a sin.
I think the most important thing to watch out is the formal (Sie) and informal (Du) form of addressing people. Not so much of politeness, but it sounds very awkward if you would address kids with "Sie" for example.
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 begin dealing with even slightly more abstract notions, these semantics break―and you just have to pick a word that you will use, without ties to its meaning. “The paper is on the table” is straightforward, as it uses the original meaning of ‘on,’ but you can't say why it's “We speak in English” and not e.g. ‘under English.’
So, German and other languages simply picked different words: it's not like you can complain that some inherent semantics are violated by that.
It's pretty much the same in e.g. Russian with prefixes, since many of them also originally denote spatial relations, and this derivation with prefixes is used in much the same way as with adpositions in English. (Speaking ‘in English’ is actually something like ‘along-English’ in Russian.)
But, English also has a habit of forming piles of new idiomatic phrases, with completely different meaning, by adding postpositions, in the same entirely arbitrary way―which makes learning these phrases an ordeal.
Speaking "on" English doesn't seem so strange if we can talk over (i.e. through) the radio.
And English gets so much less reasonable. "Put up" is to house, "put down" is to insult, "put up with" is to suffer, "put through" is to test, "put around" is to spread, "put in" to contribute, "put out" to have sex or produce, "put over" either to delay or to decieve, "put past" to offer, "put on" to act or wear or present, "put off" to delay or dissuade, "put away" to tidy or eat or earn, "put aside" to save or to forgive, "put forth" to suggest, "put back" to replace.
I think I would use over for all of those. Is that wrong?
And English phrasal verbs aren't really different from German verbs with separable prefixes. I agree though that it's one of the harder parts of the language.
You're probably right, I should have tried harder to find a better example. The "on" doesn't sound too awkward to me, though, and I might say it just to avoid saying "over" three times in a row.
so... HTTP over TCP over IP sounds most natural to me, though I guess HTTP on TCP works too.
This formulates something I thought of myself. It's a really good way to state it. The test is this: find people who are native speakers of a gendered language. Make up a dummy noun, or give them an import like "Internet". Somehow, they tend to all place the noun in the same gender.
I always thought there was some unstated rule relating to the sounds, but as a non-linguist it's hard for me to dig any deeper.
That's not generally true, especially for German. I've heard "der Blog, das Blog," "die, das Email" "die, der, das Factory" … etc.
Loan words undergo an integration process, which is more of a sociolinguistic concept, I guess. At the end of the integration process, the word becomes an integral part of the language, with a fixed gender. For example, "Manager" is integrated, and it's clear its' "der Manager," same for Computer.
Some words do seem to evoke a certain gender (I've never heard anything but "der Podcast") but you shouldn't assume your personal preference extends to all (native) speakers ("das Podcast" would easily be possible.)
But how do people assign gender during the integration process? It's a consensus process, but there are several factors: lexical similarity (Computer denotes the same concept as "der Rechner" so it becomes masculine. Same for City/Stadt (feminine)) or lexical analogies (this loan word denotes something we already have a category for) morphological analogies (words in -er are likely to become masculine, as many German masculine words already have that ending, same for nouns ending in a vowel and feminine.) Sometimes it's chaotic, but that's the nature of consensus.
This process is much easier in Slavic languages, where gender assignment follows stricter morphological rules. German, on the other hand is chaotic. Note: German is not chaotic for the reasons given in TFA, because formations with -chen -keit -heit -ung etc. have fixed, regular gender. But words which did not undergo a morphological derivation process, but are instead atomic nouns are very haphazard in their gender assignment.
I.e. "das Factory" which does sound somewhat weird (because I would think of "die Fabrik" instead), comes from "das Factory-Pattern" where "Pattern" ("das Muster") was omitted for brevity.
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 heard "der Ketchup" before.
http://www.atlas-alltagssprache.de/runde-5/f15a-f/
(fyi: Butter is a loanword from Greek. I've heard "das Butter" as well.)
It's up there with potato with the most local variations I think
https://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=411&art...
But you're right: It's a consensus process and with time words can get completely integrated and then tend to have only one gender.
There is no rule that loanwords end up as neutrum: Die Allee, die Paella, der Computer, der Laptop are just a few counter examples.
No. For example "Kiwi" originally comes from Maori language. In German, it is "der Kiwi" (the bird) and "die Kiwi" (the fruit). No neutral genus.
In this case, the genus even has importance what the word means - it is not uncommon in German that using different genera for the same noun is there to distinguish different meanings. On the website https://www.cafe-lingua.de/deutsche-grammatik/nomen-mit-mehr... some further examples for this are listed. So always learn the genus properly.
Though Das is usually the go to gender for foreign words that don't feel German enough, when you say them in a German sentence. In my experience that feeling largely depends on your expectation to be understood. I.e. mixing German with tech terms with a tech coworker is far more acceptable than mixing it with a coworker from accounting.
People are nice to you if they don't correct that :) Das Log is pretty universal a neutrum. "Ich schreib das mal ins Log", if you are used to der Log that must be an individual mistake or a dialect far removed from Hochdeutsch.
Going deeper into blog, people who still remember "weblog" as the full form of "blog" will call it "das Blog" (because "das Log" is a well established German term, gendered from "das Logbuch" perhaps), whereas people who were introduced to "blog" when it already felt like a standalone term will tend to use "der Blog", perhaps for to phonetic similarity to "der Block".
Oh and "Das Logbuch" has nothing to do with "log" but everything with "Buch". When you have compound words only the last word matters for gender.
"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".
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).
A job and business are masculine in France, feminine in Québec, it's the most common case (I think feminine is the default for all new words in Québec while masculine is the default in France).
A Game Boy however is usually feminine in France and masculine in Québec, like a party.
Others have the same gender, say blog or sushi (for another origin than just English) are both masculine everywhere.
Bring some Nutella to the table and things get interesting.
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.
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 "tiers vs. layers" in German. My quest continues.
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 ;)
The term "Keller" BTW is not a bad translation of "stack" but an original German term by one of the inventors of the stack: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stapelspeicher#Geschichte
Spreadsheet => Folha de cálculo (Portugal), Planilha Electrônica (Brasil)
You probably mean Blinklicht(er), actually used to describe flashing lights.
Ironically the German word for "blinkenlichten" is "Blinkenlights":
People do use English terms, but it's also very common that there exists a native word and people will use that. Calling computers "kompuutteri" would sound hilariously old-timey compared to "tietokone" (or "tietsikka"). The same goes for "telefooni" vs. "puhelin", though curiously enough I'm perfectly fine using both "pointteri" and "osoitin" when speaking about programming.
I guess part of it is because Finnish is not Germanic so direct loans sound bad... Often they get nativized so that eg a laptop in colloquial speech becomes "läppäri"
“Computer” is non-existent in Hungarian, we call it számitógép, built from the words számitás (to calculate) and gép (machine). Since most Hungarian words are constructed like that, it sounds completely native to the language.
I cringe whenever I hear English words mixed in with Hungarian ones, they sound completely out of place, which is probably not true for German.
On age old companies, you might have some hard time as many use proper German terms that seem foreign even to CS universtity students.
On modern companies, it is pretty much a mix of coloquial German and English terms.
Actually, I've noticed that I sometimes just use English words mixed with German in my day-to-day talking too because they come to mind more quickly. Probably ~10% of what I say when talking German is English (with German grammar of course).
Even when I was a child, with no or very little education in English under my belt, the chapter "E/A-Anweisungen" in my trusty GW-BASIC manual confused me to no end. I'm pretty sure that I would have grasped the meaning of "IO".
Where those terms still rule unchallenged is in MS Excel formulas. All the function names are translated. When you are a native speaker but used to programming vocabulary, Excel expressions read like hieroglyphics: you can easily identify most of the symbols, but the semantics remain unknown.
They spend large minutes looking for where everything has gone.
And the beauty of trying to understand what log messages in German actually mean.
Tangent: stack (as in LIFO) is traditionally translated Keller instead of the much more literal Stapel, likely to avoid ambiguity between batch (also Stapel) and stack. One of the few ancient computer English translations that absolutely did make it into the 21st century is "Stapelverarbeitung". I think that this is because it sounds just as clumsy as the concept it is describing. When you say Stapelverarbeitung you can almost feel that stack of punched cards that you have never worked with if you are my generation.
...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?
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.
Translations are difficult. If you are talking or writing you just use the first word that comes to mind, but when you are translating it takes active effort to decide on where to stop. On top of that, with open source translations there is always a bit of an assumption (and self-fulfilling prophecy) that power users would stick to the original English and when you think of an audience that does not know the technical terms it feels like helping them if you forcibly translate (which might be a mistake).
I've never heard German words for any concepts like that outside of university.
You'll usually get by just pronouncing those words a bit more German or replacing the ones that are very close to German words with the German one (e.g. cryptography -> Kryptographie but "public key cryptography" -> Public Key Kryptographie). If you want to "pass" while speaking German but need to use English jargon, just use a slight German accent and nobody will bat an eye.
Fun fact: most Latin-based English words work in German as long as you pronounce them like a German would, at worst you'll just sound a bit stilted or old-fashioned.
Only those that were introduced from Latin texts (alongside all the ancient Greek we tend to confuse with Latin). Those that came from Latin via French are for when you need to cheat in the same way west of the Rhine.
I have to say I hate mixing languages. It makes me feel uneducated and a bit like a loss of identity. Especially German is really expressive and it shouldn't be a problem to make up the words needed to express yourself.
Hope this helps and good luck with learning German. If it wasn’t my native language I wouldn’t want to learn it but I do love it.
Now this actually makes no sense.
> 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 and are neutral.
Commonly, in Germany we say "Jungen und Mädchen" if we refer to children; but which words are chosen to be used are rarely a sensible decision.
(Even though I agree in general that little kids make crappy men and women.)
You could still argue, that the "-chen"-rule should be overwritten by an "obvious-grammatical-gender"-rule.
When learning French I stopped searching for patterns in genders. Some are truly weird, like penis being feminine and vagina being masculine. But I told myself it's no different to having to remember the pronunciation of every single English word, so my brain easily has capacity for it. After a while it becomes just as natural.
[0] https://www.dartmouth.edu/~deutsch/Grammatik/Grammatik.html
[1] https://www.dartmouth.edu/~deutsch/Grammatik/WordOrder/MainC...
"While the grammar is mostly regular here, two things make this challenging: the nonsensical assignment of genders to nouns and (...)"
The given examples for weird assignment of genders are inadequate because they are explained by common rules.
Das Mädchen: Diminutive words are always neutral, and Mädchen is the diminutive of Magd.
Die Männlichkeit: Words ending on 'keit', 'heit', or 'ung' are always female.
"..., but imagine trying to hear the difference between Rat and Rad over a bad phone line."
It does not make a difference if the phone line is good or bad; 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.
> Ich hab 'nen Rat für dich
> Ich hab 'n Rad für dich
where they sound the same.
> Ick hab 'nen Rad/Rat für dich.
either way!
I couldn't believe it. Neither could my fellow students in Phonetics and Phonology.
But the spectrogram doesn't lie. Looks exactly the same.
The rules behind the shift in pronunciation can be looked up by searching for Auslautverhärtung. Isn't this A1-level German?
Because it isn't anymore the final consonant in the listed related forms. The rule is that simple. Note that it also affects some vowels.
> German speakers tend to "hear" a difference, purely by association, that isn't there phonetically.
This is so annoying. Some then try to prove you wrong and try to stress the soft consonants at the end of words until realizing that it sounds stupid and wrong. Such stubbornness.
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 pronounced differently.
In dialects they may be pronounced differently.
And for whatever it's worth, the Auslautverhärtung you referred to in several places in this thread is also just a Northern regional thing: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auslautverh%C3%A4rtung / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final-obstruent_devoicing#Germ...
Here (eastern Austria) "Rad" and "Rat" (can) sound different.
What is the ending of the pronunciation of 'und' in your region? Is it 'd' or 't'?
Yes, for TV news announcers.
> Auslautverhärtung is part of that standard.
Says who? Not Wikipedia, which says that that's a regionalism and quotes sources. Where is the standard codified?
> What is the ending of the pronunciation of 'und' in your region? Is it 'd' or 't'?
This is a trick question: If I answer the same as you pronounce it, you'll say "see, it's standard!", and if I answer the other way, you'll say "well, it's not my fault that you don't speak Standard German™".
That said, it's 'd'. If anything, it's softened further and half swallowed to say something like "un'".
You answer yourself:
> Yes, for TV news announcers.
> If anything, it's softened further and half swallowed to say something like "un'".
Do you have a recording of that?
Besides that, I wonder why you are so confrontative. I don't mean to.
No, I meant, where is the standard issued by the Kultusministerkonferenz, like there is for Standard German spelling? A convention is not a standard.
> Do you have a recording of that?
I'd say it kind of like the Swiss German speaker here: https://forvo.com/word/und/#gsw
And coming back to the original Rat/Rad distinction, https://forvo.com/word/rat/#de and https://forvo.com/word/rad/#de do sound different. The second "Rad" speaker (from southern Germany) makes almost no 'd' or 't' sound at all, but the same speaker pronounces "Rat" with a very hard and clear 't'.
> Yes, for TV news announcers.
and for everything else on TV, netflix, etc. What else would define a standard?
Why would there have to be a standard? My point is exactly that there isn't one that captures how actual people actually speak German. There is one for written German that everyone agrees on, but not for spoken German. And that's completely fine.
Also in my experience, reading text eventually is the most efficient way to learn a language, including the grammatical pecularities. If you come upon the phrase "das kalte Bier", you know that it is "das Bier".
At the beginning of learning a language, reading texts is too slow. In that phase, memorizing and practicing vocabulary or short translations (like Duolingo, which I can wholeheartedly recommend) are a good start.
In my experience, especially from learning English, it's a good idea to not look up every unknown word when reading. You quickly develop a sense of which words or grammatical concepts are important for the meaning of a sentence. If you see a new word in different contexts a few times, you may get curious enough to look it up. Or you already have a sense of its meaning.
Word use follows a power law distribution in all languages ( Zipf's Law, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCn8zs912OE is an excellent vsauce cover of the subject ), but the short of it is that within a relatively short amount of time spent studying you'll be able to pick out common words and build from there, even if you started from zero.
Knowing those will usually get your comprehension to a surprisingly high level. You can start filling in the gaps from there.
A few tips, for reading. 1) don't use translation dictionaries and instead look up words in the native dictionary. E.g. Merriam Webster is great for English. English words explained in English gives you a good sense of the full context of the word. It's all about getting a sense of context of words and constructs. 2) So, try figuring out things from their context. Language has lots of redundancies and you can sort of skim a sentence and get a rough idea of what it means even if it contains verbs and nouns you have never seen. A fun little exercise is transposing all the verbs in a sentence with something non-sensical like "fu--". Many sentences continue to make way more sense than they should after that. 3) Languages like English, German, Dutch, Swedish, etc. have lots of common roots. This can help you as well. Understanding the etymology of words that look similar across languages can help as well. E.g. English has lots of nautical terms adapted from Dutch, lots of French words that the Normans introduced and quite a bit of viking stuff as well. I actually picked up some Swedish when I was living there a long time ago; enough to be able to process simple Danish and Norwegian as well.
That being said, my German still sucks even after living in Berlin for many years. So do as I say, and not as I do ...
Seemingly arbitrary words suddenly make sense and the story behind it makes you remember them and connects them to other words. Also it is so much more interesting than just looking up some definition or word-by-word translation.
It is hilarious to 'pick up raisins' instead of cherrypicking a commit
“Ich stimme dem Maler, der die Meinung, dass Rot keine Farbe ist, vertritt, zu.”
This sentence can be rewritten in German just as in the English translation:
“Ich stimme dem Maler zu, der die Meinung vertritt, dass Rot keine Farbe ist.”
Seine Meinung, die ich nicht teile, macht weniger Sinn als ihre.
Unfortunately, especially in academic writing, some people want to appear smart and make their sentences super complicated on purpose. Fortunately, I'm not a student anymore and I stopped reading bullshit where the author doesn't respect the reader.
http://atdt.freeshell.org/k5/story_2004_3_25_32218_1824.html
Sadly Kuro5hin is defunct and google only pulls up an archive of part II...the link to part I is broken and I'm not sure whether the promised third part was ever posted.
For a limited very subset only. The rules presented there are way too easy to handle most natural language statements. That being said the core of Japanese grammar is quite simple for a human learner and the recursion is more obvious there than in most other natural languages.
From "Backus–Naur form" wikipedia:
The idea of describing the structure of language using rewriting rules can be traced back to at least the work of Pāṇini (ancient Indian Sanskrit grammarian and a revered scholar in Hinduism who lived sometime between the 7th and 4th century BCE). His notation to describe Sanskrit word structure notation is equivalent in power to that of Backus and has many similar properties.
https://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html
It is a great read but you really need to understand German to read it.
It really depends on what your mother tongue is.
I personally like the analogies. You can do things differently with language. Some languages use more words to convey some information, others encode the information in the words' gender/declination/position etc.
What makes language really difficult is that languages clash and get mixed up. Imagine a team building a compiler that works with cobol and java code. Imagine the team adapting the codebase to what works best for that new compiler and then slowly deprecating & dropping unused features.
Also completely forget the non-grammatical male / female association. Treat it like quarks in physics (up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and top): Words with the same name as familiar but mostly unrelated concepts.
Or maybe like "open(2)" vs. "open(3)".
https://linux.die.net/man/2/open
https://linux.die.net/man/3/open
Example: "die Steuer" (tax) vs. "das Steuer" (rudder)
Hardest thing for me right know is knowing when it is appropriate to use the Akkusativ versus Dativ cases. Declining is always difficult, especially considering that adjectives are declined and also this declination depends on the presence and kind of article (which is also declined).
I love Switzerland but since I am learning High German it means the Swiss are more likely to talk English to me if they know it (completely understandable, given the relationship between High German and Swiss German). So practicing is intimidating or can feel rude if I try to stick to High German in this case.
[1] https://www.watson.ch/spass/digital/724157644-zum-glueck-mue...
Seems to me that the last footnote on the website about pre-computing x+4 in pipelined processors is very simmilar to (if not the same as) the fairly recently discovered Spectre/Meltdown vulnerability. What do you think?
Redundance in language makes it easier, because it really is some kind of error protection.
Some of my customers and co-programmers don't speak good English, but that's the only reason for using German on the job.
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).
For me I found aspect in Russia the most difficult thing grammatically to grasp. I hear learning articles from an "articleless" language is similarly difficult.
As a native German speaker, this is one of the few complaints about the German language that I can relive. This is really ugly.
Yeah I know, languages, organic, beautiful, but subtle things , etc etc.. But still.
German cases have to be learned by listening to others, as your post kind of alludes to but may not be obvious to people, is that the gender assignment is not intuitive and too much of a sentence relies on knowing the gender assignment of a noun.
Fortunately, in a conversation you can listen to which suffixes people use, to reverse engineer the gender assignment of the noun. You have to store the experience in your mental hashmap and always assign the noun that way. The classical conditioning comes when people look at you ridiculously and disagree with your sentence structure, you'll re-evaluate quickly to avoid that.
In my opinion, reading texts is more efficient than listening to conversations. It's basically "on demand language streaming", you can slow down or speed up as desired.
The last duolingo I used was just trying to get humans to solve its foreign-language reCaptcha material.
Out of disgust for the solutions that existed, I went so far as to start working on my own Memrise style app which understands enough German grammar to generate English/German sentence pairs, so you can practice sentences with nouns/verbs/adjectives swapped around.
So it shows you the first sentence and you translate:
I lay the pen on a table. Ich lege den Stift auf einen Tisch
The pens lay on the table. Die Stifte lagen auf dem Tisch.
Or it shows you a present tense and you make it past:
Ich lese ein Buch. Ich habe ein Buch gelesen.
It was really effective at hammering in the edge cases of grammar (you'd practice maybe 500 sentences an hour). Though I got kicked out of Germany due to visa trouble and life took a different direction, and haven't touched it since!
Duolingo is but a tool among many. For one thing it tends to not force you to repeat enough, and for another the grammatical explanations are not that elaborate and easily ignored.
But for basic drilling it's great and I would prefer it over most other tools. After a point, of course, other things like reading, listening and writing become more important and efficient.
As I was under a bridging visa that meant I was now there illegally.
When I contacted them to find out what the hold up was, they told me what happened and that I was now there illegally and needed to leave immediately, so I did.
After the mistake was found out the visa office were apologetic and offered to give me a visa again, and the criminal case against me for overstaying was dropped.
But it was such a disruption to my life I no longer have interest.
Until I dealt with the German government and professionals that deal with the German government (taxes, visa etc), I had no idea how lucky I have it as an Australian.
A lot of the stories I formed my opinion on were second hand, issues my friends were dealing with; such as the Kafkaesque situation of registering for residency in a city, but not being able to rent without residency paperwork, and not being able to get the paperwork without a fixed address.
In Australia, it's just not a thing at all. If the Government tried to make us register with the city we're living in, we'd tell them to fuck off. Albeit in less polite language than that.
In the eight years I lived in New Zealand (as an Australian) I interacted with the government once a year to file my taxes, filled out two census forms and had a ten minute appointment to convert my Australian drivers license to one from New Zealand. It's not just that the interactions were easier, there just weren't any.
This is the type of problems that come up. I don't understand, though. There are multiple ways to get an address in Germany without a residency permit. You can also rent places without a residency permit. Maybe the person that encountered the issue you describe wanted to rent one specific place which requires a residence permit, and didn't want to do any other (temporary) thing to get an address.
But the issues don't exist in the first place in AU/NZ (and presumably UK/US though I can't speak first hand do that). Even if they did, they'd be solved in a much more straightforward manner. I guarantee a similar form here, even though it would never exist, would accept "address pending" as a valid answer.
I'm not trying to say the German way is wrong, but you have to understand how crazy it seems to a foreigner.
If a landowner wants a residency permit, which I've never seen, then maybe that was an ouvert way of saying no?
Duolingo is completely useless in my opinion. It doesn't teach you anything about grammar and doesn't teach you much vocabulary. It's more like having random conversations with a native who doesn't actually know much about their own language, except you will never ever be able to converse with a native after only using Duolingo.
It's a waste of time just like "Roseta Stone". Both try to tell you it's the "easy way" because it's how babies do it. Well babies spend years immersed and completely helpless without language until they finally get it. Even if you could go through with that, would you even want to? As an adult you would be stupid not to use the best tool you already have for learning things: your mother tongue.
If you're serious about learning a language you need some way to learn vocabulary, a good book or books in your language to teach you grammar, and lots and lots of material in the new language: books, news, films, radio etc. You will not be able to learn to speak without a sympathetic native, though.