My German vocabulary began to develop at a very young age. In Fifth grade, my parents took me to a Holocaust museum, which made me very interested about Nazi Germany. I watched countless documentaries and read countless memoirs, autobiographies, biographies, diaries, and Historical Fiction books about the topic. There would be some German words in the stories, so I naturally picked up some German vocabulary like Liebling, Mutter, Vater, Schnell, Ja, and Junge. However, I did not think much of it.

Recently (this year), when I was working on my Math IA, there were many words such as ‘eigenvectors’ and ‘eigenvalues’, in which I noticed that the Prefix was definitely German. When I looked up the Prefix eigen, the definition said unique or own. After learning the German definition, I was able to remember this term much better. At this moment, I decided that I would work hard to learn German: the language of Math, Science, and Engineering.

I promptly registered myself on Duolingo, a free language learning site, where I started to learn countless words, conjugations, and sayings. I thought that learning a language for five minutes a day was not that effective, but it turned out that I retained a lot! So much so, that I was able to have an EXTREMELY broken conversation with a German exchange student in our grade, who ended up teaching me a lot about German pronunciation (it is REALLY different than English :)).

With her help, Duolingo, my German notebook, and YouTube videos, I am now able to say and write basic sentences in German describing myself, what I like, and what I do not like. I would like to showcase what I have learned in such a short amount of time to you guys, but it would be really boring to just write it out. So, I decided to hit two birds with one stone and challenge myself to use German vocabulary and see if I still remembered how to code a Text Adventure, a program in which the user chooses and types in that text choice which would dictate what they would view next, in Python. And I surprisingly did!!! Here are snippets of it below :).

In English, this translates to Hi. I am Inchara. Nice to meet you. My family comes from India, but we live in the United States. Click on the buttons to learn more.

So do you guys want to see what I like (Ich mag) first, or what I do not like (Ich mag nicht)? How about let us go with what I don’t like (Ich mag nicht).

In English, what I do not like translates to I don’t like vegetables because they taste bad. But, I like potato and okra.

The closing message, states Thanks! My German is bad, but I want to improve. Bye, Inchara.

Now, let me restart the program, and you guys can see what I like (Ich mag) in German.

In English, this translates to I like chocolate. I want to eat chocolate all the time. I like soup and fruit (apple and pear)! I like to drink water and Apple juice. I like Math and Chemistry. I like German! I want to go to Germany someday.

The closing dialogue is the same in both cases.

As I am translating this, I think my next priority is to learn transitional phrases and improve my vocabulary, so it is not so limited! Those NEED to improve! Additionally, I will try to talk more to the German Exchange student to improve my pronunciation of words.

Hopefully, my German growth can be seen in the next Coding Text Adventure :). As my vocabulary grows, so will the number of paths and choices, which should make this much more interesting.

Bis später,

Inchara