Language Learning

I have been using video games as a mean of learning German and it works pretty well. I just wanted to share a few titles that work nicely for me.

• Epistory (typing game) great to get used to writing simple words but the story can only be listen to in English.
• Knights of honor (a grand strategy game), nice to expand vocabulary and seeing over and over again the same words, can be easily paused to translate stuff
• the curse of monkey Island (point and click), the vocabulary is much harder here, but the voices and text are really well made.
• I have not tried it, but I also saw Wonderlang which is a RPG specifically dedicated to language learning.

Does anyone have other recommendations, for German or for other languages?

Hallo!

So I thought that maybe we have people here who can help me with this:

I'm having a lot of trouble understanding when to use Dativ vs Akkusativ in German. I understand that specific prepositions require specific cases, but in general I often find myself applying the wrong case in a sentence.

In some sentences it is quite clear:

Ich habe den Stift gekauft. (Pen being the direct object that is being bought)

But there are cases like this:

Ich schlafe in meinem auto in meiner pause (I know the order is wrong, but the cases seem to stay as they are even if you change the order)

Here I would have thought that the car is the direct object. I struggle with this a lot and often apply akkusativ case wrongly.

I would appreciate if someone could help me with understanding this better. For example: Why is the car not the direct object in the above example?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27560930

Late by two days 😎

Currently, on Steam we can search by "Language" but it does not have any option to search by "Language Audio". Came across this site SteamDB that solves that.

This is really useful for people looking for games that have audio in their target language. There is option to search by subtitles too. You can also exclude english to find game that are only in your target language

I found out about languagedrops in this post: https://sopuli.xyz/post/23380411

And was wondering if it's any good?

Playing games in TL (Target Language) was one of my main goals in learning my TL. Creating this thread to share how I sentence mine from games.

Before I go further, note that there is a new tool called Wisp . For most users, WISP is probably good enough, but it is subscription based.

For me, I needed something that works with ANKI and didn't need all the other features of WISP. Actually, I mainly just needed a good game pauser so that I have time to read and understand the in-game text. Pausing the game was the main issue, many game don't have a pause feature.

The problems

• Not being able to pause games to read the text/subtitle in TL.
• How to get that text out from the game and into ANKI without typing it out every time in ANKI.

The 2 Solutions in summary :

• Solution 1 was to go into the game folder, extract all the text and dump them into a text file, process them into shorter sentences and later import into ANKI. This deck can later be sorted by frequency using Anki addons like AnkiMorphs and/or FrequencyMan.

• Solution 2 was to do it while playing game, find a way to play the game and pause the game to screen capture the text region and translate it.

I won't go into Solution 1 as that is very complicated and "hacky" and it is different for every game. I do use solution 1 if it is easy to access the game text data.

I will go into Solution 2 here.

Solution 2

Tools

• To pause games, I tried several tools, and eventually, I settled on a tool called Nyrna https://github.com/Merrit/nyrna
• For screen capturing, I use Windows sniping tool, rectangle region capture feature. It also has an OCR feature, or you can also use PowerToys Text Extractor.
• Alternatively, you can use DeepL application screen capture OCR translation feature.

Anki addons

• To convert screen captured text into Anki directly, I use PasteOCR. https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1808435406
• For 1 click translation, I use DeepL Translator https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/972129549
• For google translate : https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1536291224

Steps

• Start Game, start Nyrna , and Anki add card dialog is open, Multiple monitors are good for this. I have ChatGPT open as well, if I need some grammar explanation.

• I use Nyrna to pause the game at the part I wish to capture, I find clicking in Nyrna respond faster than using shortcuts.

• While the game is paused, I use the Windows sniping tool to screen capture the text region.

• In Anki add card dialog. I click on the "Paste image as text" button, which generates the text into one of the anki card fields.

• Still in Anki add card dialog, I then click on the DeepL or Google translate button to get the translation.

• I use ChatGPT to get more explanation as required.

• I also screen capture the rest of the game as an image to add to the card.

• If the game image is not good enough, I use AI (free credits on Leonardo AI or Microsoft Designer) to generate an image based on the text.

• I am not sure of an easy way to get audio out, so for audio, I just use HyperTTS Anki addon.

• Before using deck, i sort it using AnkiMorphs/FrequencyMan.

That is pretty much it. Let me know if anything is confusing. Feel free to share any other solutions, tips, and tricks on using games to learn languages.

I personally feel like I understand German-speaking people better the more I study the language.

E.g. my experience was that they are generally good listeners because their language has a sentence structure which forces the listener to wait for the most important information at the end of a sentence.

Bad Denglish to demonstrate:

"I have yesterday night... at the football field.... together with friends ... (dude get to the point) had a beer"

Any experiences? At home or abroad.

My recent experience:

Tried to talk to someone and it was going well until they said 2 sentences really fast and I had no clue what they said.

I must've looked confused, trying to mutter something, ANYTHING! What were the words I'm supposed to say?! I forgot the polite "sorry, could you repeat that" in every language I know.

They caught me off guard, damn it. Then came the killing blow: "English?".

In my moment of weakness I submitted and gave them a nod. From there on we were talking as equals, but my pride had taken a hit. I was defeated. I must go back to my books and duolingo and hide until I have courage again.

(Sorry for the dramatic text, wanted to make a boring interaction sound bit more interesting)

I love anki but it's hard to find a quality deck imo, mainly because the search is bad. What are your favorite decks, and for which language?

Thanks!

PS: this community is moderated again, thanks to lazycog :) He added me as a mod, too.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/25565846

WHY

I want a free app to practice and memorize vocabulary but one that also teaches grammar and audio comprehension (I can barely understand sometimes, especially since I don't use Duolingo every day) better than Duolingo does and doesn't make you lose hearts or anything.

Wanted to ask for some tips since I'm really struggling with this trying to learn German.

I know there are certain ways to guess the gender (e.g. -er endings are usually masculine, -ung feminine and loan words neutral) but often times I'm just butchering the whole sentence by not knowing the correct articles.

Let me demonstrate my frustration: in many cultures the moon is considered "feminine", but in German it has masculine article!

Bitte, hüfe!

For people interested in learning Old English, Osweald Bera is an introductory book written by Colin Gorrie that, if I recall from his prior announcement about this, leans on a method called comprehensible input to teach the language. As far as I can tell from watching some of his youtube videos and reading his other online material, this looks like it could be useful for folks that are including "Learn Old English" as an item on their New Year's Resolution list.

The preorders were just announced. They are saying they intend to begin shipping the books themselves mid-November.