Show HN: Learn German with Games
learngermanwithgames.comI just started learning German, and it has been a frustrating experience, to say the least. There are so many seemingly arbitrary rules that make pattern recognition very difficult. Therefore, I have been looking for ways to make memorization a bit easier and fun. So, I came up with a bunch of games to make learning German a bit more engaging. Hope you find it useful as well!
The 'German Time Game' is confusing (at least to a native). The answers you want to hear are words you would say about a digital clock, it's highly uncommon to use this to tell the time from an analog clock. Maybe you should consider showing a digital clock for this game. What you would use for an analog clock is what you call 'Time Short Form'.
At least https://www.learngermanwithgames.com/games/german-verbs-to-e... : has a bug. It shows correct, as soon as your substring matches. Thus, you can enter the first letter of the word and it will show it as correct.
That's a good catch! Thanks for reporting.
I'm curious, how do you write such a bug? Accidental early return in the comparison function or what?
So, in that particular game, I wanted to match a substring, since my data source includes some responses written as "let/allow" or "drive (vehicle)", which isn't realistic to expect the user to type. So, I just figured I would quickly work around that by allowing a substring match. However, I didn't really think about the edge cases all that much.
On the topic of learning German with games, the recommendation I've seen before is that many games have language options and depending on the type of game you can learn a lot that way just because you spend SO many hours in it.
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)
That's a really good recommendation! Also, a great excuse to spend more time gaming.
I don't see how people can learn a language by tests, which are only telling you if you did it right or wrong. I can see how this is used to verify the existing knowledge, but I don't see any usage in learning.
I like to think of grammar rules and the accompanying tests that make you remember them as.. rules you can use to generate any number of examples to better the language.
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.
Of course, these games won't help improve your fluency in speaking German, but they might help you e.g. remember the correct gender of a noun (and thus its "Artikel"), which is one of the most difficult aspects of German and can only be done through rote memorization.
I agree with this, I didn't see it as a game or learning anything. It didn't even give me the correct answers if I got it wrong.
This is more of a "quiz" format, not learning. There is a difference.
It's gamified. People like winning games. People dislike taking tests.
It's a nicely laid out site, but I tried every single activity on the site. Calling them games is... really stretching the definition. They are all interactive quizzes.
It's still not learning, it's verification of existing knowledge. It might be more fun than taking tests, nevertheless you cannot learn knowledge by testing knowledge, you can only verify it. Only if the user answers correctly you might consolidate the already existing knowledge.
I think it is fair to call it more practice than learning. I hope to add more games in the future that focus on the learning aspect of things. However, as a beginner, I still find that it helps me learn new words. If I continuously make the same mistake and receive feedback on my answer, it eventually makes me learn what is correct.
I thought about that probem as well, and i think an important aspect that you could improve is by showing the correct answer much more visibly.
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. - ...
I mean specifically for articles, there are only three options. So, eventually you will figure out the correct one based on the feedback.
I've tried lots of German text books, and 99% of them are essentially very easy grammar tests, which you quickly learn to fill, without actually learning to speak. In Goethe Institut's courses you also simply fill many tests, but in a group. This may help preparing for an exam, but not to learn anything.
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.
I find the 'Deutschkurse Passau" workbooks [0] to be the best at focusing on grammar structure and providing useful practice. They can be worked through without an instructor (provided you've had some exposure to the grammar at each level.)
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.
Congrats on the launch!
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.
Fair enough! I should try to introduce other options that are more game-like.
Nice, not sure if "Guess the Artikel" makes sense this way. Sometimes it’s not clear whether the word is singular or plural, which affects the article. For example, I got "Ausländer," which can either be "die" for plural or "der" for singular.
There are words that can have several Artikel, sometimes depending on regional differences (e.g. Austrians have different preferences than Germans), sometimes because of multiple meanings of a word. In that case, I would expect the game to accept all valid answers. But I got the impression that all words were singular, so "der" would be the only valid option for "Ausländer". I had a similar issue with "Geschwister", where I picked "das" (correct according to https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Geschwister), but the game expected "die" (which IMHO only makes sense for the plural form). Looks like it needs a bit more QA :)
> with "Geschwister"
I never heard that used as a singular noun. Maybe it is a Swiss thing. If anything you could say 'das Geschwisterkind'.
Sometimes it's not regional but depends on the intended meaning. "der Schild" is the thing you wear for protection (shield), "das Schild" tells you the way (sign).
The intention with that game was to pick the artikels for the singular form of the words. I am a complete beginner in German, but I thought the artikel for plurals is always 'die'. However, I wouldn't be surprised if there were a lot of exceptions to that rule. As for Geschwister, yep, that seems wrong. I will fix it!
> I am a complete beginner in German, but I thought the artikel for plurals is always 'die'.
Correct.
> However, I wouldn't be surprised if there were a lot of exceptions to that rule.
Not to this one.
I had "Jugendliche". "Der" can make sense for a male person. But "die" would also work, for the female person.
Also for „See“. Der See - the lake. Die See - the sea.
Somewhat related: if you think German is hard, prepare yourself for the friendly and talkative culture :)
I lived in Canada, Germany, and Switzerland. In my experience, Canadians and Swiss are really nice on average; however, my experience with Germans has generally been on the margins. They have either been very rude or super friendly. I guess that’s what you get when people simply speak their mind.
You're doing the Austrians and Swiss Germans a disservice :)
I didn't name a specific country :)
What do you mean?
What do I mean? Where to start. Interact with some people from the region and you will find out. As most learners of German know, the hard part of German isn't der die das, it's the exclusive culture. I have C1 in German and have been told "You sound unnatural like a Turk" (I am not a Turk) and "Children sound more natural than you" (of course - they are native speakers). You can get every case, every article, and every syllable correct and they will still find a way to laugh at you. Ask for help in Germany and you will be ignored. Or better yet, "I don't want to help you." Then they wonder why people fail to learn their language. Frankly I wish I could unlearn the language.
> You can get every case, every article, and every syllable correct
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.
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Native german speaker here, this is pretty nice!
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!
Thanks for the correction! That's good to know. I also noticed it isn't dreizig but dreissig, whereas it is vierzig (and not vierssig). I have to double-check whether it is my source that's wrong or just another exception to memorize.
> dreizig but dreissig
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.
Nice, but as someone who can read some German but not write it accurately, I found it rather hard to type any accurate answers. Having some sort of multiple choice options would be very useful to begin with.
Thanks! I definitely want to implement it as well to also make it more mobile-friendly
It's a really cool idea! Watch out for AI mistakes though, especially when generating content in a foreign language. I see one mistake in the "Time Short Form Game" image where the image has "habl" for what should probably mean "halb".
Also, 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.
Yep, I noticed AI is terrible with words on images, and that seems to have slipped my attention. Thanks for the callout! I tried to keep the number games tamed by only going up to 3 digits.
Congrats.
Some German natives may argue that the time short forms are wrong as they prefer "dreiviertel" instead of "viertel vor".
Let's not get started with that... those same people also say "viertel vier" to mean 3:15 (one quarter of the "fourth hour" has passed), which is really confusing to the uninitiated, so "viertel nach"/"viertel vor" is preferable IMHO...
We can agree that there is a big disagreement, but "viertel nach"/"viertel vor" just sounds plain wrong to me.
It does make sense though (once you know where it comes from):
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.
Yes. The other explanation is that time is nothing special, it gets just counted like everything else. You wouldn't say it's a quarter to a full cake either.
Stay with "viertel vor" please :D Well, it depends on where you are in germany...
fyi, the account confirmation email redirects and ends up on a tab with address localhost:3000. looks like it did work, i was able to login after that, but many users may assume it failed and give up
Took me to my local grafana instance, which was a surprise :D
oooo, good to know!
https://www.languagetransfer.org/courses#german
Nice!
It's a bit similar to Grammatisch, although that just focuses on the grammar.
Your answer: fünfundzwanzig nach elf. Correct: fünfunddreißig vor zwölf.
Your answer: mittag. Correct: punkt zwölf.
Your answer: acht Uhr. Correct: punkt acht.
Was zum Teufel?
Interesting. 'um X' gets labelled wrong as well. I guess at least with times OP needs to throw away the notion of the single correct answer. But yes a lot of these 'correct answers' sound uncommon in talking or in general.
Looks like this been made with AI. It seems too "clean" and simple and others have pointed out some issues.
Yep, I definitely leveraged AI when building it; however, it is still built by me. So far it is a weekend project, not meant to be a production-grade app with polish.
Vercel, React, Tailwind, and Supabase. Most likely made with AI. The hover animations area a giveaway too.
The Time Short Form Game image has a spelling error, and also the clock time doesn’t match the words.
This smells too much like AI slop.
I am a beginner to the language, and it is helping me remember the artikels and learn new words.
How do you know it's correct.
I am going to the course at the same time and live in a German-speaking country. So, I am able to contextualize and cross-reference my learnings.
Sprachspiele!