Show HN: Learn German with Games
learngermanwithgames.comAlso, I'm not sure if converting between 5 digit numbers and words is a good starting task, unless you want to dive right in with German's (in)famous word chaining ability.
Correct.
> However, I wouldn't be surprised if there were a lot of exceptions to that rule.
Not to this one.
I never heard that used as a singular noun. Maybe it is a Swiss thing. If anything you could say 'das Geschwisterkind'.
1. (männliche wie weibliche) Kinder gleicher Eltern, nur im Plural. Beispiele: "die Geschwister sehen sich alle ähnlich", "ich habe drei Geschwister (wir sind vier Geschwister)"
2. einzelner Geschwisterteil. Gebrauch: Fachsprache; auch schweizerisch Beispiel: "das ältere Geschwister"
So, you are correct, the singular form is only used by the Swiss and as a technical term. So maybe the game shouldn't contain it at all? Or accept both "das" and "die", in case someone thinks it has to be plural?
The feminist crowd just perceives a common male word as gendered and a common female word to be not.
The actual correct singular form of "[die (since plural)] Geschwister" is "das Geschwist" - a word that is rather obscure even for many native German speakers.
Right now it's hidden in a corner (iirc), so that i can barely see it. By showing the task and the answer next to each other when doing it wrong, the players might learn something of it.
What i typically recommend my students is to try to transform a learning task in a way that you need to apply a skill, without needing to do the skill itself.
For example playing english text adventure games is a very fun way to learn english. Players need to figure out what to enter using the keyboard and they use classical methods of figuring out the correct content (dictionary, translation) and they still have fun doing so. Even if it's hard work (not so much anymore with deepl etc, but back in the day it was). This can be applied to tons of tasks. - make sure you are not cheated when trading in a game. - keep up your reaction time by playing race games (a very good thing for elderly who want to keep theyr driving skills) - train your dictionary skills in scrabble. - ...
This is more of a "quiz" format, not learning. There is a difference.
You learn a language by being exposed to it countless times, but most of us doesn't have the opportunity to be immersed 100% into a foreign language. Simple rules let us try out new sentences and do some self-checks to cull out the definitely wrong ones.
This makes your "training set" significantly larger without having to "collect that data". Of course it doesn't replace anything, but it is a useful part of the language learning journey, especially the early part. Later on, nothing can replace simple exposure.
Quick feedback: the website looks very polished and intuitive. I especially liked the test about articles, where I didn’t have to type. I liked that the website works well on mobile too. The content is not what I’d call games though; based on the name I expected something different than test questions and quizzes.
Some German natives may argue that the time short forms are wrong as they prefer "dreiviertel" instead of "viertel vor".
Before the ubiquity of watches, time was announced using church clocks and bell strikes. There's a big bell for hours (low pitch) and a smaller one for announcing quarters (higher pitch).
Signalling zero is not possible using "zero bell strikes", so 00:00 is signalled by 4 strikes of the quarters bell and 12 strikes of the hour bell.
Thus, the sequences go like:
11:15 1x quarter bell
11:30 2x quarter bell
11:45 3x quarter bell
12:00 4x quarter bell + 1x hour bell
Basically it makes sense then as all the quarters belong to the same hour.
'dreiviertel Vier' is short for 'dreiviertel der vierten Stunde des Tages'.
If I try to rationalize it, it is probably that a quarter (to me) is not a distance or difference, but a single thing. So my internal parser expects a Genitiv or another thing after it, not a preposition like 'vor' or 'nach'. 'Zehn Minuten vor/nach X' sounds fine to me, 'eine viertel Stunde vor/nach X' too, but 'viertel vor/nach X' just doesn't.
Yeah? Well, you know, thats just like uh your opinion, man.
And, its dismissive and ignorant. IMHO.
So the Sims, I'd guess, is probably a good example for building vocabulary. Edit: example https://dasboudicca.substack.com/p/i-learned-german-and-siml... (This writer has lots of game learning reviews)
For articles, natives say sentences with wrong articles in them too. Seldomly because they don't know it (still happens), but because they change what they want to say mid-sentence. Cases are always a fight between the pendants and people who don't care.
Plain incorrect grammar will of course be noticeable, but grammar isn't everything.
And even if my word choice, register, or what have you is wrong, I don't understand the attitude. Because when they make mistakes in English I don't even comment.
When we moved to a German speaking country from the US some years ago, we didn't have that same experience at all.
This smells too much like AI slop.
That said, I'd love to see excercises on a really hard matter: verb controlling the noun. E.g. ich vermeide <which prep?> <noun|infinitive>. And not just random verb + random object, but sequences of the same verb, to get it remembered.
0. https://www.deutschkurse-passau.de/JM/index.php/downloads
My main complaint with most of the other German language coursebooks is the grammar lessons are too scattered, and the main effort in doing the exercises is figuring out what they want you to do.
Your answer: mittag. Correct: punkt zwölf.
Your answer: acht Uhr. Correct: punkt acht.
Was zum Teufel?
One mistake I found though: in the clock game the game's solution for one o'clock times is "eins", like "eins Uhr dreissig" for 1:30am/pm. That's not correct, you'd use "ein" instead of "eins", so the correct solution would be "ein Uhr dreissig"
Keep up learning german, I know from non-german coworkers how hard the language can be to get a grasp on!
Actually it's 'dreißig'. It can't be 'dreissig', since a double consonant like 'ss' indicates a short vowel, which a diphthong like 'ei' can never be.
>They are the same thing
No, that's in fact not the same characters (obviously?), even if they can be used to represent the same phoneme and could thus be viewed as interchangeable. I've made it explicitly clear my comment concerned spelling though.
>when you don't use latin characters.
I have no idea how to parse this, given that all three of them are letters used in latin script. I suppose one of them wouldn't be considered part of the basic latin alphabet, but then your sentence still doesn't make sense to me.
I don't know it German characters are considered to be Latin script or not. The number and meaning of characters is mostly the same, besides stuff like 'ſ', but the glyphs are all different.
s/now/no/
s/it/if/That is true. That is called e.g. 'Bahnhofszeit' and follows different rules than normal time telling. You should include that in the game description, otherwise learners may think that is how you tell the time to each other in everyday life.
I think it is less about precision as e.g. 'zwei vor dreiviertel Elf' is as precise as 'zehn Uhr dreiundvierzig', but more about the way of measuring times. E.g. you do round normal time, but truncate 'train station time'.
Not as extensive as the site but with the images, interactions, it helps with remembering the vocabularies. https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Joel+Bryan+J...
I'll test it more, congratulations.
It's a bit similar to Grammatisch, although that just focuses on the grammar.
The layout looks nice.