SaySomethingin German

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#1

Currently in alpha testing - watch this space!

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#2

I’m watching and looking forward to it.

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#3

It’s the first language I’ve heard spoken around me, after Italian.
But never been able to learn to speak it at all, and if I try to say something in German, it’s Welsh that comes up instead now. :smile:

Can’t wait to try SSiW with it and see what happens!

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#4

Just a little update that I’ve had the first 50 seeds proofread by a native speaker today, which means we’re ready to go beta once I’ve finished processing the changes :wink: (which could take a bit, I do have a long queue going on at the moment
 But we’re almost there!)

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#5

Brilliant news. I’ll be on it as soon as it goes into beta.

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#6

German is live!

Let us know how it goes - any confusing bits, wonky audio and phrases that don’t feel quite right. :slight_smile:

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#7

Good job on the voices, they sound quite natural. Although it is obvious to a native ear that the speakers are not “native” as promised in the intro, but AI rendered voices.

There are some weird things going on with word order within the smaller “building blocks”, leading to some jumbled sentences if you just blindly extrapolate them, but the sentences would still be understandable. (If you’d form the sentence “I want to speak German with you now” from the blocks as they are first introduced, you’d end up with “Ich möchte Deutsch sprechen mit dir jetzt”, happily mirroring the English word order. Correct would be “Ich möchte jetzt mit dir Deutsch sprechen”)

And I am not sure how this could be fixed, other than maybe reducing the “granularity” of the building blocks.

Edit to add: apparently the problem with word order goes both ways
 I skipped ahead a bit and was confronted with the “English” prompt “If I now German speak”, happily mirroring the correct German word order (“wenn ich jetzt Deutsch spreche”) :grin:

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#8

I gave it a quick try and, apart from the fact that I just can’t help sneaking in Welsh words here and there :sweat_smile: (not the app’s fault though!), I noticed that the words seems to keep on moving around.

Sometimes in the German sentence “jetzt” comes first (and verb and subject invert order, don’t they?)
Sometimes in comes in the middle, sometimes even in the end, and so does “mit dir”.

I’ve always found German very confusing, so maybe words do actually move around all the time depending on what else in the sentence, but at the moment I can confirm that Welsh language still seems much consistent and easy! :grinning:

In any case, I’ll see what happens next! :slight_smile:

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#9

Well, there is some flexibility in the word order, usually you can shift things around to emphasize certain words, but all in all, you’ll likely end up being understood regardless.

Overall I think, the problems with word order even out in the long run as you get more exposure. I’ve skipped ahead a few more times, and all of the longer sentences I have come across are spot on :+1:

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#10

Oh, quick question about pronunciation, since I’m not able to perceive the subtle differences with this sound (not even between my relatives speaking South Tyrolean German and High German either):

are the Welsh “ch” and German “ch” identical? (or supposed to be)

#11

Thanks for having a listen! What you’ll find there is our attempt at handling quite a strict and very different word ordering in the language pairs. What we’ve tried to do is have the target language (German) set the word order, and then flex the English as much as possible to fit the German without becoming incomprehensible. In the buildup to the final phrases there’ll be some variation to practice the blocks without confusing the learner too much with the word order, but also getting the learner used to the correct word order, kind of at the same time.

So in general the long sentences SHOULD always have the correct German word order. The shorter blocks building up to them will have correct word order as much as possible - a lot of the time, context is missing to be able to tell what the correct order should really be, so in these cases it can shift a little bit, but the important part are the words.

But it’ll become clearer to us from learner feedback where the painful and confusing parts are, and we can make another improved version


Edit - Also, they’re AI clones of native speakers @Hendrik :wink: But yes, I think a rephrasing of the welcomes would be good :smile:

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#12

In some German accents yes :wink: But mostly no. (@Hendrik can explain more :laughing:)

(my partner speaks German with a very Welsh accent and often gets told he sounds swiss because of the ch)

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#13

Yes and no. The problem is that “ch” in German has two “sound values”. The “hard” ch in German and the Welsh ch sound exactly the same. The “soft” ch is a different matter, and it’s kind of a hissing sound not unlike the welsh ll-sound, but it’s formed in a slightly different part of the mouth. (And that is the ch-sound in both “ich” and “möchte”)
As a rule, you only get the hard ch after the vowels a, o and u (for example Dach, Loch, Buch). After the other vowels i and e, as well as after umlauts and consonants you always get the soft ch. For diphthongs, look at the vowel directly before the ch, so “weich” gets a soft ch, “Lauch” gets a hard ch.
Because sometimes forming the plural involves shifting a vowel to its umlaut, you get the singular with a hard ch, and the plural with soft ch: Dach → DĂ€cher, Loch → Löcher, Buch → BĂŒcher.

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#14

The one area where AFAICR there is no flexibility is that the finite verb should be the second thing in the sentence (not necessarily the second word) and everything else pivots around that. Almost as inflexible is that non-finite verbs should come at the end. So in effect you’ll say things like:

I can now at home work.
At home, can I now work.
Now can I at home work.
etc

I don’t know if it’s helpful, but I always remembered this by thinking of the line from Coleridge:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree.

Notice that the finite verb (in this case an auxiliary, but finite main verbs also come second in German) is second and the non-finite verb is at the end like in German. And we can play around with everything else if we keep those two things constant to change emphasis and things like that.

1.In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree.
2. Kubla Khan did a stately pleasure dome in Xanadu decree.
3. Kubla Khan did in Xanadu a stately pleasure dome decree.
4. A stately pleasure dome did Kubla Khan in Xanadu decree.

For the bits in the middle, not all orders are equally nautural and some imply a certain emphasis; but that is quite complicated and maybe better to learn by osmosis. Also, to be totally honest, I can’t remember the rules for that other than that time adverbials come before place adverbials in neutral sentences (and supposedly also before manner adverbials too, although I was never personally convinced that was quite right) and that pronoun objects always seemed especially difficult for me to put in the right place with respect to other elements like adverbials.

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#15

Thanks a lot for the explanations! :slight_smile:
I’ll try to pay attention to the difference.

If things get complicated, I think I’d be satisfied enough even if people thought I’m Swiss like @Kai 's partner. :grin:

@martin-harte thank you!, I’m not commenting now cause I’m tired, but I’ll read your answer tomorrow with a fresh mind.

Edit: alright, yes, I think I got the idea. Some elements must be in a certain order, in a language, and only move for a very specific reason (like standard vs emphatic sentences in Welsh). While the order of other elements may still sound more or less natural, or convey a slghtly different meaning, but there’s a bit more freedom about their placement.

The only thing now is that being the app in Beta, and without any comments at all (unlike the older courses like Welsh and Spanish), and with only a vague knowledge of the language, you can’t tell when it’s a mistake still needing to be corrected, and when it’s just normal.
But anyway
for now I can just go on and see!

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#16

I think the best tactic might be to treat the short segments as practice to remember the vocabulary and not strictly the word order, then pay attention to the word order once you get into the longer, more complete sounding sentences.

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#17

Right, makes sense, I’ll do that. :slight_smile: :+1:

Speaking of German course: I think I might be stuck in the “speaking topic” area.

It keeps on presenting “du sprichst” and been using very few other words, and no other new one for a while, despite awarding me with new belts.

I find it really hard to pronounce, so I don’t really mind the extra practice right now :sweat_smile: but at some point it may become a bit repetitive.
I remember it happened before to other people as well, but can’t remember where to find the solution!

(I’ll logout and login again, just in case, and see if anything changes)

#18

Hmm, I had quite a lot of “du sprichst” when I was testing yesterday. I’ll have to see if I get past it :slight_smile:

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#19

This sound has one parallel in English. The ‘H’ sound in the word Hue.

#20

You should delight in these kinds of sentences when they come up in the app. I mean that genuinely. Because of this thing in main clauses where the finite verb comes second, sometimes sentences in German can look like SVO sentences (subject verb object order) like in English. They aren’t. German is actually SOV, more similar to Japanese* than English in that respect. The easier SVO-like sentences look superficially similar to their English equivalents, but it’s an illusion: their structure is totally different.

So it’s precisely these sentences with the weird word order that will teach you the actual sentence structure of German.

  • If anyone reading this speaks Japanese, I think you’ll find it fun to check out the word order in subordinate clauses in German. I think you’ll find some of it surprisingly intuitive if you put your Japnese hat on.
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