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Show HN: Learn German with Short Stories
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.
https://webbu.app/german https://webbu.app/german
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- phyrex 3y agoIDK if it got hugged to death, but I'm unable to load stories from the archive
- fersarr 3y agoYea, sorry about that! It was a spike in traffic and my server was too small. It's back on now.
- throwaway2203 3y agoI would love this in Egyptian Arabic.
- fersarr 3y agoAh sure, I could add that. Would that be learning Egyptian Arabic from English?
- throwaway2203 3y agoYes!
- codethief 3y ago+1 for Spanish
- jan_Inkepa 3y agohttps://imgur.com/a/qqxr7JY https://imgur.com/a/qqxr7JY just to let you know, sometimes the translation is in the wrong direction when I click on words.
- fersarr 3y agoah! I will fix that, thanks!
- NotHereNotThere 3y agoThe link translates from English to Japanese for me ;)
- birdstheword5 3y agoI think this is a really cool idea and would be something I would use. Is there some way to translate short phrases like "drehte sich um" all together rather than word by word?
- curiousfab 3y agoThat would be really helpful because taken out of context, single words translated to English will often produce very confusing results. My suggestion would be to ditch the google links and provide a properly translated version that is revealed when hovering over a word/phrase. Such a translation could be crowd sourced.
- fersarr 3y agoYea, I can definitely improve that! That sounds like better way to do it. Thanks!
- clbrmbr 3y agoOr, ask an LLM to give glosses. You can tap to get a gloss in English. (Or other languages later.) GPT-3.5 is already very good at sense disambiguation
- clbrmbr 3y agoGPT-4 Prompt: Please assist with providing English glosses for a German text. For phrases which are not easily interpreted word-for-word, please provide a gloss for the whole phrase. Otherwise, provide a gloss for each word. You may output the glosses as a list, one gloss per line, german on left, followed by an arrow (-->), and then the english gloss. 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.
- RugnirViking 3y agoIf this is using LLMS then it would be great to expand to as many languages as possible because anthing outside of large languages are very poorly served by existing language learning apps. Danish (from english) would be my preference, but I imagine you could have a user configurable pair (I understand the situation is much, much more dire if you don't even presently understand a large language english,spanish,chinese etc)
- fersarr 3y agoYes! I would love to expand to more languages! I am prioritizing the ones I understand otherwise it becomes really hard ha. So, yeah, I will add more languages :)
- codethief 3y agoWould it be possible to add different translation engines, like DeepL or ChatGPT? (ChatGPT in particular is often much better than all the alternatives.)
- aimor 3y agoThanks for sharing this, I'm trying it out now. 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.
- fersarr 3y agoThanks for the feedback! That should be fixed now :) If you have some time, let me know what you think
- kreas 3y agoThis is off to a great start. I've been studying German through various methods for around 3 years now. Mostly as a mental exercise but also because I love German television. For me, reading has been one of most productive ways to learn.
- TurkishPoptart 3y agocan you recommend any German shows? thanks!!
- DataDaoDe 3y agoI liked: Türkisch für Anfänger, Dark, Kleo, ans Stromberg. Unfortunately I’d say IMHO if you’re accustomed to US series you won’t find a lot of German ones that stand up to the production values and acting quality. Dark is a notable exception there I think.
- bloak 3y agoYes, but "Dark" (Netflix) doesn't have a lot of words spoken per hour, as I recall, so perhaps it's not so good for language learning. There's also "Beat" (Amazon) with a somewhat gruesome main storyline. If you wanted to get linguistically flummoxed there's "Capitani" on Netflix. (A great story, but it's in Luxembourgish!)
- schroeding 3y ago(All non-amazon links will probably require a German IP / VPN - you may find those shows on other streaming platforms, too) 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 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-und-boerne-oder-muenster/6K83DYE8mU2naWeNPy8F5 https://www.ardmediathek.de/sammlung/tatort-folgen-mit-thiel... https://www.daserste.de/unterhaltung/krimi/tatort/index.html 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-1/Y3JpZDovL25kci5kZS8xNTE2/1 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-staller/index.html 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-f4cc-9f1e-db0c-c960648781df https://www.amazon.de/gp/video/detail/amzn1.dv.gti.9aab6ee1-...
- nickybuzz 3y agoThis is awesome! I've been casually learning German for 200+ days now, so this will make a great addition to my practice. Are the short stories generated by LLMs too?
- fersarr 3y agoNice to hear! I'm in the same position! Trying to keep it going and to find new ways to keep it interesting.
- bluGill 3y agoEvery week? you need to supply daily assignments at least. You can't learn much with just one study session per week. Maybe you can drop down to 5 days per week (weekends off), but the more you study the faster you will learn.
- fersarr 3y agoHa nice idea! Perhaps I can make it configurable like you are saying!
- clbrmbr 3y agoIntermediate German student here. I haven’t studied German in about seven years. I found the example story surprisingly easy to understand. I wonder if that’s because it was generated by an LLM, which is mostly trained on English and is generating, basically thinly veiled English story in German. 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!
- fersarr 3y agoInteresting point! I asked had a German native to go over the text but it will definitely be something I keep an eye on from now on. Thank you for checking it out!
- cloogshicer 3y agoNative German speaker here. My partner is a native English speaker and I was about to recommend this to her. 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-spaziergang-im-wald https://webbu.app/l/german/story/ein-unerwarteter-spaziergan...
- clbrmbr 3y agoI think this can be solved through asking the LLM to improve the output itself. I asked GPT-4 to "provide more idiomatic and grammatically correct versions. Consider whether each phrase sounds like German," and got the following output: 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?
- clbrmbr 3y agoI tried the first paragraph, too. Seems to have made several idiomatic improvements: 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- okeuro49 3y agoPersonally I found German texts on the Kindle invaluable, with the auto dictionary lookup. Erich Kaestner and Hans Fallada were my favourites as they used an easy/journalistic style.
- Tepix 3y agoThere's a mistake in the first paragraph of the story i checked: Heute, viele Jahre später, hatte er seine eigene kleine Fischerboote kleinen
- tlhunter 3y agoI taught myself some German by translating Die Bruders Grimm stories word by word, writing between the lines. Combined with other learning sources it seemed to work okay.
- phyrex 3y ago“Die Brüder Grimm” ;) A lot of those stories aren’t written in contemporary German and would sound very weird if you used it in your day to day language.
- samtho 3y agoAs someone who learned German as a second language (so take this with a pinch of salt and feel free that I did this wrong/bad), I found older German works useful for the purpose of understanding sentence structure and grammatical case. Immersion introduces vocabulary and contemporary ways of speaking. Stuff like the verb in second position was not difficult for me and asking questions by leading with a verb is actually still used frequently in English (more so in en-GB). Additionally, a number of European languages heavily use the verb “to have” in ways similar to each other, where an American English speaker may use “to be”, or “to do”, but the one thing that, to this day, I find myself struggling with occasionally is the gottverlassen grammatical case.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Suppafly 3y agoso to make it plural, you just change the u to a ü?
- phyrex 3y agoIn this case yes. Not in every case. I don’t know if there’s a rule
- nohaydeprobleme 3y ago
- WaitWaitWha 3y agoClicking on the words launches new tabs/windows into Google for translation. Very annoying. sending me to Google as a search link is super annoying. Some words (e.g., war, Tag, um) are not only in German, so the translations can be confusing. 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.
- fersarr 3y agoI have just improved the word translation so that it doesn't send you to Google as the first option. Let me know what you think :)
- Y_Y 3y agoI had exactly the same thought about the new tab. Kindles and OSX devices (among others) can already give an intrusive popup with a translation or definition. 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.
- fersarr 3y agoThanks @WaitWaitWha and @y_y! I definitely want to improve that and have the translations on the same page! Hopefully very soon :) thanks for trying it out.
- thesuitonym 3y agoHey this is really a great project! Thanks for sharing. Any thoughts on expanding to other languages?
- fersarr 3y agoHey! Yes, definitely! I will be adding more very soon. Which one are you looking for?
- Tade0 3y agoI struggled with German in middle school because it was the only foreign language available there and I wanted to hone my English instead. 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.
- fersarr 3y agoHopefully we can add something closer to that experience at some point too.
- AntoniusBlock 3y agoI learned to read German by working through "German for Reading" by Karl Sandberg. It's a great book. Work through it a couple times until the grammar is second nature, use the Anki deck "4000 German words by frequency" to increase your vocabulary, and start reading children's books (Emil und die Detektive, Max und Moritz, u.s.w) then move onto slightly harder books like Kafka's Die Verwandlung and Zweig's Schachnovelle. Max und Moritz is hilarious btw, so don't skip it!
- fersarr 3y agoThanks for sharing those resources! I'll have a look
- amitheonlyone 3y agoI am experiencing an issue where if you click a word to get translation, a new Google search with 'translate "war" to english' opens. The problem is that it doesn't try to translate from German. Instead it translates the English word 'war' to Latin for some reason. I think a better search keyword is 'translate "war" from german to english'
- amjd 3y agoExperiencing the same issue. Google is falling apart. It's choosing English as the source language with queries like this, and destination is any language which you may have used recently with translate. A note to the OP: translate "Fischerboote" to english - doesn't work translate "Fischerboote" from german - works
- fersarr 3y agoYep you are totally right, will make those changes and maybe try to have the translation on the same page! Thanks for the feedback!
- fersarr 3y agoI have just improved the word translation so that it doesn't send you to Google as the first option. When you have a chance, let me know what you think :)
- fersarr 3y agoYou are right, that would be better, I will improve the search query. Also I'll try to have that on the actual page so that it's a better experience. Thanks for the feedback.
- xhevahir 3y agoWhen I was studying German twenty or so years ago I got good results from reading lots and lots of children's books, starting with the really basic stuff--like books meant for kindergarteners--and working my way up to books by Erich Kästner. By grading the material in this way you can read a lot without getting tripped up by unfamiliar words every sentence.
- yamtaddle 3y agoI've got a book called Mein Erstes Buch ("My First Book"—apologies if I screwed up the spelling, I don't have it with me at the moment to check) that starts at "see spot run" difficulty ("Ball. Red ball. Red ball and Tom. Tom bounces the red ball."—stuff like that) and, through pictures and words, by the end, has you reading at maybe a 4th grade level (whole pages of text, only occasional images). 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.
- rixed 3y agoThere are several children books with that name. Was it maybe this one: https://archive.org/details/meinerstesbuch0000unse/page/4/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/meinerstesbuch0000unse/page/4/mo... ?
- yamtaddle 3y agoYes, that's it!
- watwut 3y agoWould you be able to identify that book please? I would buy it, but cant tell which one it is from google search.
- gdcbe 3y agoAs a Native Dutch speaker that story reads like it’s written in an alternative ancient Dutch ancestor, very different vind then what I usually get from German.
- wwilim 3y agoI like the google translate powered click-to-translate, truly the best kind of low-effort functionality. 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 =)
- fersarr 3y agoYea hopefully I can add a few more languages soon!
- monksdream 3y agoI have found ChatGPT a great tool for that sort of task (I study French). A typical book meant for students trying to improve their reading skills usually starts from a certain level which is fairly high for me currently. By using an LLM you can tailor-make a story i.e. define your level (“Give me a short story in French, for someone with very limited vocabulary” or “for a seven-year old”) and then adjust accordingly if it’s too easy/hard, ask to use only grammar you have studied (“only using present tense”), pick a familiar topic (“about a someone who studies Physics in college”) etc.
- fersarr 3y agoGreat ideas! Will see how it works :) I particularly like the idea about "only using X tense"
- rahimnathwani 3y agoI recently started using LingQ for this. It's effortful rather than easy, which makes it a bit harder to develop into a habit, but the technique seems very effective, and the platform works well both when importing content and when studying it. Maybe you're targeting people who are more casual learners, and aren't willing to do stuff that feels hard?
- fersarr 3y agoWasn't aware of LingQ, thanks for sharing it. Perhaps you are right about the targeting. Casual learners... but also busy people that would benefit from the format. We'll see.
- rahimnathwani 3y ago"but also busy people that would benefit from the format" IMO busy people need tools that give the most learning per time spent, not tools that feel easy at the expense of pace of learning. These tools tend to require effort (e.g. LingQ, Readlang, Language Transfer) rather than ones that feel easy (e.g. Duolingo).
- clbrmbr 3y agoI believe it’s possible to both feel easy AND be highly effective. Extensive reading would fall in this quadrant. Trouble is that below a certain level you need lots and lots of graded readers. A somewhat improved version of OP’s project may solve that problem, providing an unlimited firehose of reading at an appropriate level.
- uvbu 3y agoLooks cool! Though, I'd like to note that the fisherman story is not only unidiomatic German, but also contains a bunch of mistakes
- fersarr 3y agoThank you for having a look! Sorry about the issues with the fisherman story, I'll ask my native friend to help improve it. Hopefully I'll get better at this!
- ignite 3y agoI've always enjoyed using comics when getting started with a language, Calvin and Hobbes, Garfield, etc. Short, limited vocabulary, visual cues, and I'm frequently familiar with the original.
- tempaccount1234 3y agoIt‘s cute. Make sure to get some feedback from native German speakers to iron out they little mistakes or unusual word order. Also, never capitalize every first letter in a headline. Either capitalize every letter or use correct rules for which words are capitalized.
- fersarr 3y agothank you!