I had a game called Tom Clancy's Division, and a sequel. Theyre very long, grindy, repetitive games with a lot of text, a lot of spoken dialogue with full subtitles, and plenty of collectible audio things that can be replayed. I learned a lot of Russian amd German playing both these games.

That's a really good recommendation! Also, a great excuse to spend more time gaming.

Of course, these games won't help improve your fluency in speaking German, but they might help you e.g. remember the correct gender of a noun (and thus its "Artikel"), which is one of the most difficult aspects of German and can only be done through rote memorization.

I like to think of grammar rules and the accompanying tests that make you remember them as.. rules you can use to generate any number of examples to better the language.

You learn a language by being exposed to it countless times, but most of us doesn't have the opportunity to be immersed 100% into a foreign language. Simple rules let us try out new sentences and do some self-checks to cull out the definitely wrong ones.

This makes your "training set" significantly larger without having to "collect that data". Of course it doesn't replace anything, but it is a useful part of the language learning journey, especially the early part. Later on, nothing can replace simple exposure.

I agree with this, I didn't see it as a game or learning anything. It didn't even give me the correct answers if I got it wrong.

This is more of a "quiz" format, not learning. There is a difference.

It's gamified. People like winning games. People dislike taking tests.

There are words that can have several Artikel, sometimes depending on regional differences (e.g. Austrians have different preferences than Germans), sometimes because of multiple meanings of a word. In that case, I would expect the game to accept all valid answers. But I got the impression that all words were singular, so "der" would be the only valid option for "Ausländer". I had a similar issue with "Geschwister", where I picked "das" (correct according to https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Geschwister), but the game expected "die" (which IMHO only makes sense for the plural form). Looks like it needs a bit more QA :)

Fair enough! I should try to introduce other options that are more game-like.

Let's not get started with that... those same people also say "viertel vier" to mean 3:15 (one quarter of the "fourth hour" has passed), which is really confusing to the uninitiated, so "viertel nach"/"viertel vor" is preferable IMHO...

Stay with "viertel vor" please :D Well, it depends on where you are in germany...

I lived in Canada, Germany, and Switzerland. In my experience, Canadians and Swiss are really nice on average; however, my experience with Germans has generally been on the margins. They have either been very rude or super friendly. I guess that’s what you get when people simply speak their mind.

You're doing the Austrians and Swiss Germans a disservice :)

What do you mean?

I find the 'Deutschkurse Passau" workbooks [0] to be the best at focusing on grammar structure and providing useful practice. They can be worked through without an instructor (provided you've had some exposure to the grammar at each level.)

0. https://www.deutschkurse-passau.de/JM/index.php/downloads

My main complaint with most of the other German language coursebooks is the grammar lessons are too scattered, and the main effort in doing the exercises is figuring out what they want you to do.

Yep, I noticed AI is terrible with words on images, and that seems to have slipped my attention. Thanks for the callout! I tried to keep the number games tamed by only going up to 3 digits.

We have been told that it might be normal to tell the time like that from an analog clock in places where precision matters (like train stations or airports). As a beginner, this is how we started to learn it as well in the course I am taking. I think it makes your brain work harder by making it do more processing (you need to interpret the clock + the numbers, whereas a digital clock simply gives the number to you, so less mental processing is needed). I see where you are coming from, but it helps me with my learning and coursework.

That's a good catch! Thanks for reporting.

Very cool! I really need to work on my mobile development skills.

Thanks! I definitely want to implement it as well to also make it more mobile-friendly

Thanks for the correction! That's good to know. I also noticed it isn't dreizig but dreissig, whereas it is vierzig (and not vierssig). I have to double-check whether it is my source that's wrong or just another exception to memorize.

There was a small problem with the redirect after registration, but it should now be fixed. Thanks for trying!

Thanks for trying! I have been using Duolingo as well and I definitely am considering to add more click-based games.

Took me to my local grafana instance, which was a surprise :D

oooo, good to know!

Yep, I definitely leveraged AI when building it; however, it is still built by me. So far it is a weekend project, not meant to be a production-grade app with polish.

Vercel, React, Tailwind, and Supabase. Most likely made with AI. The hover animations area a giveaway too.

Yeah the clock game is weird. One solution was "fünfundzwanzig vor zwei" which I never heard in my life (native German). At least in my region one would say "fünf nach halb zwei" or "Ein Uhr fünfunddreißig".

Interesting. 'um X' gets labelled wrong as well. I guess at least with times OP needs to throw away the notion of the single correct answer. But yes a lot of these 'correct answers' sound uncommon in talking or in general.

A thing that OP might also not know: 'punkt acht' is 'precisely at eight', if you want to say 'eight o'clock', that's 'um acht'. The literally meaning of something being 'um' is, that something has passed fully, or is completed.

Your first one gets me puzzled. Normally, you take the shorter time to the full hour. Nobody says 'fünfundvierzig vor zwölf', for example. I never said or heard 'fünfunddreißig vor zwölf'. Before half past an hour everyone says '... nach elf'.

I am a beginner to the language, and it is helping me remember the artikels and learn new words.