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.

[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!

[ruhrnalist@mastodon.social]

@michelleful @pentup
Maybe challenging?

Well, in fact it was easy for me. Got points!

[larozeppeli@plasmatrap.com]

@michelleful@scicomm.xyz Finished the first two levels instead of going to sleep.
It's really well-thought and engaging. It makes language look like a puzzle you can rebuild bit by bit, hope you keep working on it!

[conniptions@mastodon.social]

@michelleful Great fun and really good stuff - just bounced a bit off the use of 'workweek' which I now understand to be a common Americanism but have only rarely come across before (UK here). Will bear in mind that we are using strictly American English from here on in, but...

[rickoooooo@social.authbypass.com]

@michelleful I played through level 1 and enjoyed it!

[michelleful@scicomm.xyz]

@conniptions Interesting! Do you use the term "working week" instead? If it's any consolation I accept British and American spelling! If they have a different number of blanks that's a bit harder to support though...

[michelleful@scicomm.xyz]

@Ruhrnalist @pentup Excellent!! The 3rd mode, which has zero hints, even free ones (except for "next letter please") is currently the "challenging" mode

[conniptions@mastodon.social]

@michelleful Yes, 'working week' would be more of a thing, though not a common usage really. 'Workweek' is an interesting Americanism in that it is both highly obscure (to me at least) yet immediately and unambiguously intelligible, once given, and ofc tough to fill in a blank with if you've never heard of it. Contrast 'pants' or 'sidewalk' which are widely known Americanisms outside the US, yet both highly ambiguous and essentially unparseable without prior knowledge.

[conniptions@mastodon.social]

@michelleful There's an argument to say accepting only American spelling would be better if terms like 'workweek' are being used. But this could all be just me demonstrating the limitations of my own personal vocabulary; perhaps 'workweek' is not after all as obscure round these parts as I think? I don't work for the OED or anything Am tempted to run a poll tomorrow when the rest of the UK is awake.

[michelleful@scicomm.xyz]

@conniptions please do and let me know the results!!

I am definitely going to continue accepting the British spelling, if only because I am someone who both uses it (coming from Singapore) and uses the word "workweek" (for whatever reason, I don't feel like it's ever not been in my vocabulary).

[michelleful@scicomm.xyz]

@larozeppeli thank you!! This is what I was aiming for!