A puzzle game of linguistic decipherment by Michelle Fullwood.
German Is Awful Easy is a puzzle game where you decipher German phrases and sentences. We'll start with phrases and sentences that are easy to guess using cognates (words from a common ancestor) and shared cultural knowledge, and quickly get to decoding complex sentences using your pattern recognition and logical induction skills.
I'm trying to recapture the memories I have of wandering around Germany, trying to make sense of the language, and the little jolts of delight and recognition whenever I figured something out. If that sounds like something you would do, this is the game for you!
Mark Twain has a hilarious essay about "The Awful German Language". (Read it, by all means, though be warned: there are spoilers.) And, to be honest, it can get pretty gnarly! (Though no gnarlier than English can be, for the unsuspecting learner.) However, when you're not trying to produce German, you can ignore some of the most tedious parts — and I hope that the remainder that we cover here is, perhaps not easy, but precisely the right level of difficulty to be fun.
Absolutely not. The less the better.
That's not the goal. I hope you'll learn something about German, especially the shortcuts you can use if you do want to pick it up for real, and some of the logic behind the gnarliness of the language. If you have a great memory, you may well learn many German words, but that's entirely optional. The goal is those moments of epiphany!
You may find that this game is more "German is Too Easy", but you may enjoy joining the dots on the common etymological origins of the words, or learning about the logic of German word order. Give it a try!
No worries, just use the "Memory" button within each round to see the previous sentences in the round. And make liberal use of the hints, especially the free ones! If using hints stresses you out because points are deducted, consider playing in Casual mode.
Your progress is stored in the local storage of your browser. That means you won't be able to open it up on a different browser or device and continue from where you left off.
Switch modes whenever you like. Replay old levels to get a new score or improve a previous one. Your most recent score will be kept, even if you switch to Casual mode and back.
🚧 This game is in alpha, with 10 levels currently available. 🚧
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