I've been making a linguistics puzzle game where you decipher a language (which happens to be German) using shared etymology, shared cultural knowledge and pattern matching.

[rubyjones@wandering.shop]

@michelleful Such a great idea! But I seem to be stuck here. Am I meant to progress? Have I got it wrong. Am I meant to just click Levels to return?

[divverent@misskey.de]

@michelleful@scicomm.xyz As a German, I can't tell how well it works, as it's clearly too obvious to me at first. If I could skip to the end, I could maybe better see how well it works, but indeed, it doesn't surprise me at all, as the languages are kinda close, especially when including English anachronisms like "thou" and even "hast".

Also, virtually every English verb ending in "-ate" is actually a Latin verb ending in "-are" in its infinitive, and often common with German where the suffix usually becomes "-ieren". As such, you can immediately translate words like "instigieren", "dehydrieren", "aktivieren". For some words the translation to English is a bit more complex such, as "akzeptieren", "alkoholisieren", "subtrahieren" (which, of course, is "subtrahere" in Latin, which shows that the German "-ieren" is ambiguous about its origin, and even can occur entirely non Latin related, like in "verschmieren" or "den Haustieren").

[clemenspitschke@ecoevo.social]

@michelleful
@mosgaard this seems like something you could enjoy with your recent rediscovery of the German language.

[oelnbod@mastodon.social]

@rubyjones @michelleful I have the same issue, but awesome game otherwise!

[edintone@mastodon.green]

@michelleful I'm no linguist and my German is rusty, if it was ever very good. This though is a lot of fun.

[ravi@toot.io]

@michelleful Das ist sehr toll!

[michelleful@scicomm.xyz]

@rubyjones you need to put another noun in the first positions! Click on the current noun to return and try a different one! Same for both clauses

[michelleful@scicomm.xyz]

@Oelnbod you need to put another noun in the first positions! Click on the current noun to return and try a different one! Same for both clauses.

[pentup@mastodon.art]

@michelleful Hi Michelle - I enjoyed and learnt from level one (I'm tertiary educated and speak only English but enjoy words and etymology - I played on competitive). I've bookmarked the rest for later but here's my feedback after level 1:

"Competitive" seems like a strange name for a difficulty tier - it implies a different mode in which players compete (like ranked or multiplayer).

[pentup@mastodon.art]

@michelleful
The Coleridge puzzle bugged me because of course I quote it "nor any drop to drink" - that's how he wrote it! Is it common to misquote it like that?! Not big deal at all, just a minor annoyance for me, personally.

[pentup@mastodon.art]

@michelleful
For the "I drank beer" puzzle, the explanation talks about why "have" gets moved to the second slot, but that doesn't seem like what happened to me. I feel like "I have drunk beer" would be the English order of those words (not "I beer have drunk"), so the weirdness to me is that in German "drunk" comes after "beer", not that "have" comes before "beer".

[argonaut@mastodon.social]

@michelleful @bobthomson70 i fear the level with all the -zeug words… prob the big boss level…

[sharonybaloney@alaskan.social]

@michelleful I couldn’t get the 6th question to play and it wouldn’t move on from there. Tried casual and competitive. The one with fill in the blanks “I drink beer, you drink milk”
Would like to play another time.

[mosgaard@uddannelse.social]

@ClemensPitschke @michelleful thanks, it looks really nice, but I’m afraid it got a little too language-technical for me as a not native english speaker.

But I really liked the refreshing take on language learning!

[portaloffreedom@social.linux.pizza]

@michelleful @libreleah I think you might find this interesting!

[michelleful@scicomm.xyz]

@Sharonybaloney if you tap on a word (e.g. ich) and then the first blank, does it move?

[michelleful@scicomm.xyz]

@pentup Thanks for your feedback! I'm using a simplified version of what I believe to be the standard syntactic analysis. Where it may seem not to be explanatory is the fact that "beer" is currently stipulated to be before "drunk". We can tell that that's the case when we start looking at the subordinate clauses where the verb doesn't move at all, though. We haven't gotten there yet! I'm not sure if this entirely addresses your question, but I think I get where you're coming from

[michelleful@scicomm.xyz]

@pentup You're probably right there that people might think that there'll be a leaderboard for competitive. I was just looking for a C word that fit in between haha. Maybe "classic"? I will wait for more feedback before changing it but thank you for flagging it!

[michelleful@scicomm.xyz]

@divVerent Thank you! I'm not sure about the "how well it works" either, but teaching German isn't the main goal, it's to have fun exploring a new language without needing to memorise a lot of words and having a bunch of little epiphanies along the way Thanks for the -ieren examples, I should definitely include some of those cognates in a future level!

[michelleful@scicomm.xyz]

@pentup Ah yeah, I was looking for a more direct translation of the German I had there, and I think that's how most English speakers quote it! I might say "Translate word by word" or something like that and be less snarky about how no one says "nor any", because clearly someone does!