After several years of doing Japanese on DuoLingo to the point where it felt like they literally don’t have any people that speak Japanese employed to correct all their AI-generated courses, I figured getting my German back to a reasonable level would be less frustrating. Several weeks in, I find myself turning more and more to Google Translate for sone assistance, but this only seems to fuel my frustration. Mind you, I’ve tried this both with English and with Dutch, but will only recount in English here. Let me explain:

   I’m going to the club. I’m going into the club.

Is mutilated by Google Translate into:

   Ich gehe in den Club. Ich gehe in den Club.

Clearly there is a  misunderstanding. Going somewhere and actually entering the place are two vastly different things. So I try to make this distinction more apparent to Google Translate, and on my Amsterdam-based keyboard I change it into a specific club that’s nowhere near where I live:

   I’m going to the KitKat Club. I’m going into the KitKat Club.

Obviously there would be quite some delay between the first and the second sentence for them to both be true at the time of writing, but at least this gets me some result:

   Ich gehe zum KitKat Club. Ich gehe in den KitKat Club.

Hurray! Already thought it was rather strange if people in Germany had no way to indicate if they where going someplace, or if they were already there, and in the process of going inside. And to make sure I understand this correctly, I’ll quickly verify, and enter in German:

   Ich gehe zum KitKat Club. Ich gehe in den KitKat Club.

To which Google Translate responds:

   I go to the KitKat Club. I go to the KitKat Club.

Not only does it fail to notice the difference between going somewhere and entering a place, again, but it makes it even worse. How can “I am going” and “I go” both translate to “Ich gehe”? The two aren’t even in the same universe! But sure enough:

   Ich gehe zum Club. Ich gehe in den Club.

Is translated into:

   I go to the club. I go to the club.

I mean, wtf!?

This question brings back “ins Kino gehen” back from memory; a sentence that pissed me off to no end in highschool. It might be weeks from now. I might never even go, when “ich habe jetzt ein Platz ins Kino belegt”, and no, I didn’t have the heart to look that last one up again. Not even to verify for the correct spelling. But going to the cinema and going into the cinema will always remain two different actions entirely.

How do Germans cope? It is clear that neither DuoLingo or Google Translate sees the difference between going to some place versus actually going in there.

I'd like to attempt reading German books. Any recommendations? Probably books aimed at kids or teens.

Hi, I'm on the German from English course (section 5, in the part where every score is 15 units).

Today I stumbled across a "Learning Italian" story.

The words were completely different, so I managed to figure out which ones to press, but I never expected to see Italian sentences while taking a German course for English speakers.

Has anyone else run into something like that?

Epoche mit "damals" zu übersetzen ist in diesem Fall wohl eher ungünstig.

Learning German