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Comment by cloogshicer | Hacker News Reader

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 lachten und hatten eine gute Zeit [...]" --> This seems like a bad translation of "had a good time", which doesn't translate directly to German like this.

Would definitely not recommend this overall.

[1] https://webbu.app/l/german/story/ein-unerwarteter-spaziergan...

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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

My sarcasm detector is failing me. Mid 19th century Germany (around the time the Struwwelpeter was written, that would have been the Deutscher Bund, when nationalism was seen as progressive) is culturally, sociologically more different from late 20th century Germany then late 20th century Germany from late 20th century USA methinks.

The Struwwelpeter continues to be part of German culture.

German parenting is very different from American parenting. Struwwelpeter is an extreme, but it does capture the essence of the tough love approach, emphasis on following rules (or suffer the consequences) etc

Certain elements of German culture did not just develop in the last 150-200 years :)

Extreme? I read it when I was 6 or 7, and was amused by it. I have a number of books that are inappropriate for children, but Struwwelpeter isn't one of them.

Exaggerated might be a better word. It is stories meant to educate kids on proper behavior. The consequences shown in Struwwelpeter are just empty threats parents make - but depicted in that book.

I also read it at age 6 or so.

Many American parents would find it inappropriate for kids given how graphic and negative it is. I think it is a classic however.

I'd call cutting a child's thumbs off as a punishment for sucking on them pretty extreme. Or being burnt alive for playing with matches. And yes, I'm German.

Hardly worse than Hansel and Gretel being popped in the oven.

The burnt alive story was not about punishment. It was about what could happen if you play with matches. Fire doesn't care how old you are.

As for the tailor, even I at 6 or 7 knew that wasn't going to happen. I didn't know any kids who were missing thumbs!

I started watching German television on YouTube a couple years ago and had a very eerie feeling when I discovered the ZDF Heute Show and Harald Schmidt's show (modeled after the Daily Show and David Letterman, respectively). It might seem trite to point out a couple of television shows, but it was certainly a surprise to me. Do you think the similarity owes more to US involvement in post-war reconstruction or general globalization?

One of the things I like about the Heute Show is that the gags often point at some cultural thing I knew nothing about (in fact, I think it was one of those gags that led me to reading Stuwwelpeter in the first place). Similarly, I encountered something last week that prompted me to read Max und Moritz. So I assume these things still have cultural relevance, even if as a sort of short-hand, but I certainly see your point (edit: at least superficially).

In the aftermath of WW2, it surely was the post-war reconstruction (in what became West Germany at least). Later on, US cultural exports from Disney to Mc Donalds dominated. Hollywood, satellite t.v. and now the WWW have major influences (cue "Amerika" by Fee). Germany isn't a small US, there remain significant differences (for the better or worse), but travelling (later immigrating) from Germany to US, the latter seemed eerily familiar and strange at the same time.

I'd wager that kids in Germany today (or for the last 40 years or so) can relate more to Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn than to Struwwelpeter, not the least because the former was made into a (quite well done) t.v. show dubbed and broadcast in Germany.

Lots of US TV gets adapted for other markets. Check out how many US-original game shows have Chinese versions, for instance. Lots.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_game_sho...

Sitcoms also get adapted pretty often. Talk and panel shows, sometimes.

We do the same thing in the US, just a bit less because we've got a really, really big domestic entertainment industry, so something's got to seem just right (in terms of "will this make money?") to get picked up, shouldering its way past all the US-original shows trying to get made, but it does happen. The Office, Power Rangers (half import, half adaptation), Iron Chef, Ninja Warrior (also has a German version!) and a bunch of others.

Not exactly stories in text, but there is a YouTube channel called “Deutsch Lernen Durch Hören”[1] (“Learning German Through Listening”), which has hundreds of stories for all levels.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/@DldH

not a collection, but Heinrich Böll, An der Brücke, is one of my favourite shorts in any language.

I suspect these might be generated by chatgpt or similar.

Kafka has some collections of short stories that are great. Some are no more than a page long but impactful, so they satisfying to stumble through with bad German skills.

I once spent an afternoon on just the first sentence of Das Urteil. I had to draw syntax trees to figure it out!

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?

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.

I learned more from comparing these two paragraphs than from reading the original.

Little things like where the comma goes, sich verlaufen vs sich verirren.

Ich soll mehr mit le Chat auf deutsch quatschen.

This can also be solved picking a copy of Goethe's Faust in German. It's an entertaining story.

I'd use „hatten viel Spaß zusammen“ instead of „schöne Zeit”.

Thanks for confirming my gut response, that something felt "off" about the language here. As a German learner (B1-B2ish) I had a sense something was off-key, then had a suspicion machine translation was involved when OP offered to make an Arabic version very quickly for another commenter.

My German-speaking friends can always tell when I get lazy and run a text message through DeepL instead of writing it myself in German. Please, don't ever think machine translation is a good basis for a language-learning app!

Thanks for the feedback! I'm going to be working on improving this so hopefully It will be up to your standards very soon. I do have some ideas to check and the comments from today helped a lot. Also, I'll ask my native friends for some help.

Paired with the autogenerated questions which require upgrading to check.

One might as well use Duolingo, they have an interactive story feature which I feel does a better job than this (despite how poor I believe duolingo is for learning a language.)

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

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