Show HN: Learn German with Short Stories (webbu.app)
Hi HN! I have been working on a webapp to keep learning German and today I want to share the first version. In the past, I have used books with "Short stories" to learn the language and I always wanted more stories so I thought I could put that into an app. Short stories are nice because the learner can attempt to understand words from the context of the text and it feels like less effort than a traditional language app.
Additionally, the app format allows for practice questions at the end and you can use LLMs to check whether the answers are correct; so the users can check themselves.
So this is that! Let me know if you have any questions.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 190 ms ] threadGPT-3.5 is already very good at sense disambiguation
Here's some of the output:
Es --> It
war --> was
ein --> a
sonniger --> sunny
Tag --> day
im --> in the
Wald --> forest
und --> and
ein --> a
Mädchen --> girl
namens --> named
Lisa --> Lisa
ging --> went
spazieren --> for a walk
Sie --> She
hörte --> heard
plötzlich --> suddenly
ein --> a
Geräusch --> noise
und --> and
drehte --> turned
sich --> herself
um --> around
I was expecting "drehte sich um" to be grouped together, but I'm pleased with the glosses.
Note how "sich" is glossed with "herself". That's understanding the context properly. Much more useful than a dictionary definition of "sich". Similar for "sonniger" which Google translated as "sunnier" out of context.
EDIT: Note that GPT-3.5 gave me exactly the same glosses.
One thing I noticed is that the translation links are auto-detecting the language, so some words are assumed by Google to be a language other than German.
For me, reading has been one of most productive ways to learn.
If you wanted to get linguistically flummoxed there's "Capitani" on Netflix. (A great story, but it's in Luxembourgish!)
Stromberg - German adaptation of The Office, but Bernd Stromberg (aka Micheal Scott / David Brent) is a bit of an asshole this time and it's not a paper company, but an insurance company.
https://www.amazon.de/Stromberg-Staffel-2/dp/B00ERLPUNA
Tatort - mostly serious show about police solving murders, produced by all of the local public broadcasters, e.g. there are Tatorts from Cologne, Münster, Munich, each using the regional dialect. "Polizeiruf 110" is the version of the ex-GDR, it works the same way. The Münster-Tatort is quite funny:
https://www.ardmediathek.de/sammlung/tatort-folgen-mit-thiel... https://www.daserste.de/unterhaltung/krimi/tatort/index.html
Tatortreiniger - a show about a crime scene cleaner in weird situations. If you know "The Cleaner" from the BBC: This is the original show it's based upon. The main character uses a northern german / Hamburg dialect.
https://www.ardmediathek.de/serie/der-tatortreiniger/staffel...
Hubert und Staller - show about incompetent bavarian rural police solving murders, heavy focus on comedy, bavarian dialect. The first few seasons are quite funny, the later ones are meh.
https://www.daserste.de/unterhaltung/serie/hubert-und-stalle...
Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter - "Generation War" outside of Germany, mini-series about a group of friends and their roles in WW2.
https://www.amazon.de/gp/video/detail/amzn1.dv.gti.9aab6ee1-...
Oh, and while you're at it, get Das Boot if you haven't already, also available as a TV miniseries.
As for movies, you could do a lot worse than picking up a few Wim Wenders movies - say, Der Himmel über Berlin or Alice in den Städten.
Oh, if you pick up Der Himmel über Berlin, consider picking up In weiter Ferne, so nah! as well. Same universe, but more run-of-the-mill than Himmel über Berlin, which is probably the most poetically beautiful movie I have ever seen.
I know I’ve seen a lot of complaints on the Latin sub Reddit about GPT generating really bad English sounding Latin.
However, for learners coming from English, this may actually be a benefit as you can get exposed to reading way faster. And ultimately reduce the time until you can read Kafka and Goethe…
Bravo!
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...
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?
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.
Little things like where the comma goes, sich verlaufen vs sich verirren.
Ich soll mehr mit le Chat auf deutsch quatschen.
On that note, do you have a recommendation for a collection of actual German short stories?
English: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24571
German: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24571/24571-h/24571-h.htm
Certain elements of German culture did not just develop in the last 150-200 years :)
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.
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!
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).
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.
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.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/@DldH
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.)
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!
Erich Kaestner and Hans Fallada were my favourites as they used an easy/journalistic style.
Heute, viele Jahre später, hatte er seine eigene kleine Fischerboote
kleinen
But in the dative (Dativ) case where the "brothers" are an indirect object, the plural form has a different spelling. The singular „den Bruder“ transforms into „den Brüdern“. For example, if you want to say "I gave it to the brothers," you can say: „Ich habe es den Brüdern gegeben“.
To figure out the plural forms, I use the online Leo dictionary (e.g. at https://dict.leo.org/german-english/bruder), which often includes a table icon for indicating when the noun endings change in other cases.
For studying plural forms of any noun, you can follow general rules for pluralization and individually memorize the plural forms of each noun with flashcards. You can also read and listen to native content to develop an intuition for what sounds right.
A while ago I came across an ancient copy of "Teach Yourself German" printed around the start of the Second World War. The very first chapter had a list of those German nouns that form their plural just with an Umlaut and instructed the reader to learn them. I bet you won't find many books published today that start like that. I like to think there are still a few people around who learnt German by reading that edition, perhaps during an air raid.
If you did want weird, how about learning German from the lyrics of Bach cantatas? :-)
Translation can be done prior to displaying the story, and make the words appear as hover boxes, and even provide more language context.
The example story is asking me to log in and subscribe to get a full demo. A demonstration in my mind supposed to demonstrate how the system works prior to commitment.
I am unable to provide you free QC/QA because I would have to give you my email.
I'm an intermediate German speaker and even to me the language in the example story felt weird. I'm totally into the idea, and if the usability was better I'd probably use the site despite the non-idiomatic text.
Ultimately what helped me to pass were dubbed animated series like The Simpsons. Live action stuff usually had too much background noise for me to follow properly.
Max und Moritz is hilarious btw, so don't skip it!
A note to the OP:
translate "Fischerboote" to english - doesn't work
translate "Fischerboote" from german - works
I haven't gone through the whole thing, but I did maybe the first third of it one day, some years back, and it did work—the farther I got, the slower-going it was, but I was learning enough to keep progressing, and the way it was designed, the older parts kept getting reinforced in a kind of spaced-repetition sort of way, so at least temporarily I did have all the earlier material in my head, 100%. Very little of it stuck long term—but then again, I probably didn't spend more than ninety minutes with the book. Not enough on its own to meaningfully learn to read German, but I bet it (or something similar) could be great as part of a larger program incorporating other resources. I was really surprised at how effective it was.
You can get even more bang for buck if you add a dropdown at the top to select the target language - you will now support learners from every country in the world in 3h of work tops =)