
German for Programmers - zdw
https://wickedchicken.github.io/post/german-for-programmers/
======
jlangenauer
Having lived in Germany for 3 years now, and managed to speak German to a
half-decent level (B1/B2), I offer the following observations.

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.

~~~
levosmetalo
While it's true that people that want to understand you would understand you,
even if you speak wrong, it's not something "not to worry about".

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.

~~~
pluma
That's true but I'd say it's less about appearing lowly educated than about
reinforcing your foreign-ness.

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.

~~~
ascar
It also shifts with time. 30 years back the prejudice would have been flipped.
As a white immigrant you would've probably been a low educated russian or
polish worker, while with a taint you would've been Italian and much more
respected.

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.

~~~
jacobush
Some comes from the attitude of creating the group "2nd generation
immigrants". In the US, that's basically not a thing.

There are reasons of course, just sayin'.

~~~
Nasrudith
Yeah birthright citizenship for one. Complaining that people who don't belong
to a group don't identify with it and act like it is just stupid.

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.

~~~
madez
There is the option to obtain the citizenship following the procedure for it.

There is the option to leave the country.

It doesn't sound entirely unreasonable or unfair to me.

~~~
jacobush
There is also the option of being a citizen by birth, yet be called 2nd
generation immigrant, or heck, third.

~~~
madez
Yes, there is racism and ethnic stigmatization in Germany. It even goes both
ways. It's a sad mess.

------
aasasd
> _Prepositions claim different areas of ‘cognitive space’ in English and
> German_

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.

~~~
repsilat
Right. _In_ HTTP _on_ TCP _over_ IP?

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.

~~~
Sharlin
Yeah, phrasal verbs (verb-particle combinations) are almost entirely
idiomatic. At least as a non-native learner, I've found it best to memorize
them as units and not to even think about what the adposition would mean
affixed to a noun, and that's how they were taught as well.

~~~
aasasd
That's the only way to memorize them, since they constitute essentially new
words, with distinct meanings―same as any idioms.

------
lordnacho
> The genders of individual nouns and the grammatical rules to decline
> articles and adjectives using those genders constitute a shared set of rules
> that the sender and receiver both know. It may not approach the Shannon
> limit, but German gendered nouns form a weird, organically developed forward
> error correcting code. This might be a convoluted example, but imagine
> trying to hear the difference between Rat and Rad over a bad phone line.
> Your brain has to do this kind of reconstruction all the time, you’re just
> not usually conscious of it! “Gib mir das Ra{d,t}” makes the distinction
> clear – a German speaker would decode it as das Rad immediately, because
> that “just sounds right.” The declinations are just parity bits in the
> sentence, and whatever “just sounds right” is actually an error-free
> solution to a parity calculation.

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.

~~~
adimitrov
> Somehow, they tend to all place the noun in the same gender.

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.

~~~
onli
What happens often here is that a word has a clear gender that just feels
right to basically all germans. But an alternative gender gets used by a group
that does not trust its language feel and instead relies on logic to derive
the gender. Blog is a good example: It's obviously "Der Blog", but because
some people think "blog is short for weblog, and log is neutral" they use "das
Blog", though that just sounds wrong to everyone else.

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.

~~~
EdwardDiego
Don't loanwords auf Deutsch tend to end up with "das" as the prefix? Das
Restaurant etc. I figured blog would be a loanword in German also?

~~~
wolfgke
> Don't loanwords auf Deutsch tend to end up with "das" as the prefix? Das
> Restaurant etc.

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...](https://www.cafe-
lingua.de/deutsche-grammatik/nomen-mit-mehreren-bedeutungen.php) some further
examples for this are listed. So always learn the genus properly.

------
Spearchucker
Got excited when I read the title but.

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.

~~~
pantalaimon
Just use the English words like everyone else.

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 ;)

~~~
swah
This happens in Portugal vs Brazil. Portuguese have native terms ("mouse" is
"rato") and Brazilians just import everything "mouse", "celular", "desktop".

~~~
radicalbyte
Dutch vs Flemish is the same. The dutch use the English word and the Flemish
make their own word.

~~~
toolslive
That's not correct. The invented word probably comes from the 'Taalunie'. It
might be that the Flemish adhere more to it than the Dutch (I have no
statistics)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Language_Union](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Language_Union)

~~~
radicalbyte
They make a new word using Dutch spelling whereas the Dutch use the English
words one-for-one. Basically all of the words around computing are English
words (which actually made it harder to learn Dutch, you need to know when the
English words are actually the correct ones).

~~~
toolslive
I'm Flemish, and I worked in The Netherlands for more than 4 years. The dutch
understand "muis" (mouse) "toetsenbord" (keyboard). There are dutch words with
different meaning in both regions (like "aftrappen", "precies"). I think the
biggest problem learning Dutch for foreigners (except for the rather
complicated grammar) is that there are plenty of dialects (especially in
Flanders).

------
badesalz
About the nonsensical assignment of gender to nouns I agree in principle but
just a quick tip for the particular example in the footnote: “Mädchen” ends in
-chen which is the diminutive form of a word (originally “die Magd” for a
young woman). All words ending in -chen are neutral. Similarly, “das Bübchen”
could refer to a young boy and is also neutral.

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.

~~~
aasasd
> _All words ending in -chen are neutral. Similarly, “das Bübchen” could refer
> to a young boy and is also neutral._

Now this _actually_ makes no sense.

~~~
contradictioned
As someone else commented,

> 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.

~~~
aasasd
My objection is not to the formulation of the rule, but to the existence of
the rule―because where I'm from, a little girl is still a girl, grammatically
too.

(Even though I agree in general that little kids make crappy men and women.)

~~~
contradictioned
Ah, then maybe to clarify further: This rule applies to virtually every word.
A table is "der Tisch" (male), a small table is "das Tischchen" (neutral); a
tree is "der Baum" (male), a small tree is "das Bäumchen" (neutral); a break
is "die Pause" (female), a small break "das Päuschen" (neutral), etc. In
theory you can take every word and diminish it by appending "-chen".

You could still argue, that the "-chen"-rule should be overwritten by an
"obvious-grammatical-gender"-rule.

~~~
aasasd
My complaint still stands, but OTOH I just realized I now have a way to turn
German into English at least in one aspect.

------
amaccuish
Anyone wanting help with German grammar, I thoroughly recommend the dartmouth
german grammar pages [0]. (I used them for GCSEs and A-Levels). They have a
page explaining the bracket structure [1]

[0]
[https://www.dartmouth.edu/~deutsch/Grammatik/Grammatik.html](https://www.dartmouth.edu/~deutsch/Grammatik/Grammatik.html)

[1]
[https://www.dartmouth.edu/~deutsch/Grammatik/WordOrder/MainC...](https://www.dartmouth.edu/~deutsch/Grammatik/WordOrder/MainClauses.html)

------
madez
I like the analogies, but I'd like to nitpick, if I may.

"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.

~~~
pantalaimon
> 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.

~~~
Tomte
Yes, they are pronounced identically.

I couldn't believe it. Neither could my fellow students in Phonetics and
Phonology.

But the spectrogram doesn't lie. Looks exactly the same.

~~~
madez
Why is it difficult to believe that there are phonetic collisions? There are
even lexical collisions with _different_ phonetics like in Weg vs weg.

The rules behind the shift in pronunciation can be looked up by searching for
Auslautverhärtung. Isn't this A1-level German?

~~~
codeflo
Because the final consonant is actually pronounced softly in related forms
("Rad/Räder" vs. "Rat/Räte"), German speakers tend to "hear" a difference,
purely by association, that isn't there phonetically.

~~~
madez
> Because the final consonant is actually pronounced softly in related forms
> ("Rad/Räder" vs. "Rat/Räte")

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.

------
bayesian_horse
Tip for remembering if a noun is male, female or neuter, visualize it as
burning/being burnt/blowing up for coding female and freezing for coding male.
Of course you can reverse the system if you prefer.

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.

~~~
RightMillennial
I took German back in high school but I don't really remember anything about
it. How can you read if you don't at least have an idea of what each word or
phrase means? I'm a native born English speaker, and I occasionally have to
look up English words if I have no idea what they're supposed to mean. It's
one thing if it's an obvious random word for a gadget such as doohickey. I
can't imagine reading a foreign language and surmising what a word means
without a definition.

~~~
Baeocystin
I won't say it's _easy_ , but it's easier than you might think.

Word use follows a power law distribution in all languages ( Zipf's Law,
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCn8zs912OE](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.

------
dgrabla
Git reference in german [https://github.com/danielauener/git-auf-
deutsch](https://github.com/danielauener/git-auf-deutsch)

It is hilarious to 'pick up raisins' instead of cherrypicking a commit

------
kara_jade
The super-complicated LIFO example is, unfortunately, a contrived example:

“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.”

~~~
marton78
Besides, it should be "keine Farbe sei"

~~~
biztos
“Ich stimme dem Maler zu, der meint, Rot sei keine Farbe.”

~~~
hesk
Danke!

------
DennisP
A somewhat related article is Japanese for Nerds, which among other things
provides a Backus-Naur form for Japanese grammar.

[http://atdt.freeshell.org/k5/story_2004_3_25_32218_1824.html](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.

~~~
xaedes
Btw: Sanskrit is originally defined with similar-to-Backus-Naus-form rules.

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.

------
fileeditview
Some of the commenters here might be interested in the wonderful essay by Mark
Twain: "The Awful German Language":

[https://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html](https://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html)

It is a great read but you really need to understand German to read it.

------
kv0
It's funny that as a german I'm now learning interesting stuff about my own
language in a foreign language about a language made up to make machines do
things.

------
stewbrew
"Probably the first difficulty people run into when leaning German is
memorizing the gender of each noun and properly declining that noun’s articles
when used in a sentence."

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.

~~~
pjtr
Memorizing gender: I hear the trick is not to do it separately ("1\. I know
the word 'Mädchen'. 2. Its gender is feminine.") but as an integral part of
the word ("1\. I know the word 'das_Mädchen'.").

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/2/open)

[https://linux.die.net/man/3/open](https://linux.die.net/man/3/open)

Example: "die Steuer" (tax) vs. "das Steuer" (rudder)

------
wolfi1
Mark Twain seemed to have the same troubles with German: "The Awful German
Language"
([https://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html](https://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html))

------
cjslep
American who moved to Switzerland 1.5 years ago and learning High German (now
in A2).

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.

------
tobltobs
A bit offtopic but there [1] is a funny list of some really weird details of
the German language. After reading those examples I can not understand how
some people are able to learn German at all.

[1] [https://www.watson.ch/spass/digital/724157644-zum-glueck-
mue...](https://www.watson.ch/spass/digital/724157644-zum-glueck-muessen-wir-
nicht-deutsch-lernen-so-lacht-das-internet-ueber-unsere-sprache)

~~~
alpaca128
Well, you can do that with every single language out there if you look for the
most ridiculous examples. The ones in this link are funny but partially so
far-fetched that for one comparison I had to take a look in the dictionary, as
a native speaker.

------
laszlokorte
I am currently learning (german) sign language and I see very many parallels
to programming languages there as well. Eg the subject object verb sentences
structure reminds me of a stack machine and establishing references points
(for persons or objects) in the space around your body in order to later in
the sentence (or in future sentences) related to to them reminds me of
register allocation.

------
vrbsky
Interesting article.

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?

------
fluffycat
Programmers? Sure German language needs a nice round of refactoring. Remove
all redundancies. It would be a huge changelist with shit ton of lines
removed, and still all tests for meaning pass.

~~~
xaedes
Removing all redundancies would require everyone to speak and formulate
perfectly. Otherwise the message is lost. A lot of misunderstanding would
happen.

Redundance in language makes it easier, because it really is some kind of
error protection.

~~~
fluffycat
Not necessarily in case of German, What exactly articles give to the meaning?
What would it lose if they are removed or consolidated into a single article.

------
k__
I'm a native German speaker and for programming I mostly use English only.

Some of my customers and co-programmers don't speak good English, but that's
the only reason for using German on the job.

------
TheCabin
As a German, I still learned a lot from the article. Thanks!

------
badestrand
What a wonderful write up! I learned a few languages already and think about
languages and their complexities a lot. Very interesting post!

------
m0zg
"Die Männlichkeit, masculinity, is female". Happens all the time. It's also
female in Russian ("мужественность").

------
qwerty456127
The thing I and many other people hate the most in any language that has it
(German included) are cases. The rest is easy.

~~~
amaccuish
Personally love them. Not so much in German, but in Russian they make word
order wonderfully flexible. You can just blurt stuff out, adjusting the case
as you go along, to build a sentence, rather than having to go back and
restart.

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.

~~~
wolfgke
> What bugs me with German inability to reliably form plurals

As a native German speaker, this is one of the few complaints about the German
language that I can relive. This is really ugly.

------
partiallypro
I've been trying to learn German (at least enough to carry on a light
conversation,) so I'm hoping this will help me. I've mostly been learning to
speak it, haven't really focused on writing/spelling...though I do understand
some basic German grammatical concepts from speaking.

------
cstrat
This is blocked for me by Cisco Umbrella? :S

------
dekhn
I don't really speak german, but I do know that at the end of the sentence all
the verbs the germans put.

------
gammateam
Good job on attempting to map German to some programming concepts.

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.

~~~
bayesian_horse
I would recommend starting with something like Duolingo. It will give you a
head start on listening comprehension and grammar.

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.

~~~
gammateam
Duolingo and apps like it, including Memrise, really fail with German. They
can be good for syllable pronunciation and maybe memorizing gender of some
nouns, but they never will explain or brush on the more complex nuances of any
language, which you would learn in the second week of any formal education.

~~~
reitzensteinm
I agree with that. I banged my head on Duolingo and Memrise for ages before I
got a tutor, and things fell in to place within weeks.

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!

~~~
bayesian_horse
It's not that easy to get kicked out of Germany...

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.

~~~
reitzensteinm
The visa office made a typo in my email address when setting the appointment,
and when I didn't show up, they sent me another email asking if I wanted to
reschedule, and when I didn't reply to that, they closed my case.

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.

~~~
madez
Interesting story. To avoid that to happen, I'd recommend to get a lawyer and
to contest the authorities decision. You could have worked that out if you had
looked into it. Sure, just letting it go is suboptimal, but in cases like this
one things should still be able to be fixed if the mistake was on the
authorities side.

~~~
reitzensteinm
For me it was a wake up call for how stupid I was being entrusting my welfare
to a badly designed bureaucracy. All I'd be doing by fighting for the right to
stay would be setting myself up for another messy situation that impacted my
livelihood down the road.

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.

~~~
madez
I know other people from other countries in Germany. They use a similiar
language as you do. Are the rules really that bad, or is it that they are
unintuitive?

~~~
reitzensteinm
I would estimate as a freelancer that the paperwork and accounting involved
was five times more difficult than in New Zealand where I was also a
foreigner, growing from an annoyance to a substantial (and expensive) burden.
That alone is enough that I would caution foreigners against moving to Germany
to start a business or be self employed.

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_.

~~~
madez
> 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.

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.

~~~
reitzensteinm
Right, with patience, persistence and a little bit of Googling you can always
work through the issues.

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.

~~~
madez
I simply don't understand things to be crazy. Rent a place, have an address,
file for residency permit, done.

If a landowner wants a residency permit, which I've never seen, then maybe
that was an ouvert way of saying no?

~~~
reitzensteinm
I'm not sure if it's possible to explain the difference without living in both
countries!

