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.
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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.
It's called German Is A̶w̶f̶u̶l̶ Easy and the first five levels are up! No German knowledge necessary, and feedback is very welcome.
German Is A̶w̶f̶u̶l̶ Easy
Personal website for Michelle Fullwood, NLP scientist and linguistic tinkerer. Language tools, maps, miscellany.
(michellefullwood.com)
#etymology #linguistics #puzzles #LearnGerman


@michelleful I played through level 1 and enjoyed it!
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@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...
@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...
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@michelleful @pentup
Maybe challenging?Well, in fact it was easy for me. Got
points!@Ruhrnalist @pentup Excellent!! The 3rd mode, which has zero hints, even free ones (except for "next letter please") is currently the "challenging" mode

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@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 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.
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@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 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 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.@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).

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@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!@larozeppeli thank you!! This is what I was aiming for!
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@Sharonybaloney if you tap on a word (e.g. ich) and then the first blank, does it move?
@michelleful oh, wow! I thought I tapped it every possible way. But that worked. I figured it was a me problem, but I’m glad I said something because I was curious to see where it was going as the difficulty ramped up. Thanks.
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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.
It's called German Is A̶w̶f̶u̶l̶ Easy and the first five levels are up! No German knowledge necessary, and feedback is very welcome.
German Is A̶w̶f̶u̶l̶ Easy
Personal website for Michelle Fullwood, NLP scientist and linguistic tinkerer. Language tools, maps, miscellany.
(michellefullwood.com)
#etymology #linguistics #puzzles #LearnGerman


Poké @LeoApwal
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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.
It's called German Is A̶w̶f̶u̶l̶ Easy and the first five levels are up! No German knowledge necessary, and feedback is very welcome.
German Is A̶w̶f̶u̶l̶ Easy
Personal website for Michelle Fullwood, NLP scientist and linguistic tinkerer. Language tools, maps, miscellany.
(michellefullwood.com)
#etymology #linguistics #puzzles #LearnGerman


@michelleful French speaker here, learned English and German at school, this is a fun three languages exercise.
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@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.

@michelleful @Oelnbod I got stuck there for a minute too. I think it would help to have a sentence like “the subject isn’t always in first position” on that screen.
I finished the first level and I liked it
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@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".@michelleful It took me a minute to figure out why I couldn't type anything here!
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@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 Ah, OK, thank you. I think some kind of visual feedback would help here, as the tiles are showing green, so it looks like it's correct. I also found it difficult to swap the nouns out, as I had tried that before and it seemed like it wouldn't let me. I tried a few more times after you said and eventually got it to work, but that might be something to look at.
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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.
It's called German Is A̶w̶f̶u̶l̶ Easy and the first five levels are up! No German knowledge necessary, and feedback is very welcome.
German Is A̶w̶f̶u̶l̶ Easy
Personal website for Michelle Fullwood, NLP scientist and linguistic tinkerer. Language tools, maps, miscellany.
(michellefullwood.com)
#etymology #linguistics #puzzles #LearnGerman


@michelleful this is fun!
I speak both languages, and I love the explanations!
️
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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.
It's called German Is A̶w̶f̶u̶l̶ Easy and the first five levels are up! No German knowledge necessary, and feedback is very welcome.
German Is A̶w̶f̶u̶l̶ Easy
Personal website for Michelle Fullwood, NLP scientist and linguistic tinkerer. Language tools, maps, miscellany.
(michellefullwood.com)
#etymology #linguistics #puzzles #LearnGerman


@michelleful @jimbob Any plans to expand this to other languages?
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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.
It's called German Is A̶w̶f̶u̶l̶ Easy and the first five levels are up! No German knowledge necessary, and feedback is very welcome.
German Is A̶w̶f̶u̶l̶ Easy
Personal website for Michelle Fullwood, NLP scientist and linguistic tinkerer. Language tools, maps, miscellany.
(michellefullwood.com)
#etymology #linguistics #puzzles #LearnGerman


@michelleful Nice work! Though for me it seems to get stuck at this screen, with no feedback or ways to progress.
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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.
It's called German Is A̶w̶f̶u̶l̶ Easy and the first five levels are up! No German knowledge necessary, and feedback is very welcome.
German Is A̶w̶f̶u̶l̶ Easy
Personal website for Michelle Fullwood, NLP scientist and linguistic tinkerer. Language tools, maps, miscellany.
(michellefullwood.com)
#etymology #linguistics #puzzles #LearnGerman


@michelleful This is great!
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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.
It's called German Is A̶w̶f̶u̶l̶ Easy and the first five levels are up! No German knowledge necessary, and feedback is very welcome.
German Is A̶w̶f̶u̶l̶ Easy
Personal website for Michelle Fullwood, NLP scientist and linguistic tinkerer. Language tools, maps, miscellany.
(michellefullwood.com)
#etymology #linguistics #puzzles #LearnGerman


@michelleful this was both fun and slightly embarrassing for me, as i took a semester of german in college and seem to have forgotten almost all of it
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