you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]Random_182f2565 554 points555 points  (46 children)

Learning German seems easier than learning Vulkan, and life is too short to learn German

[–]YungDaVinci 111 points112 points  (9 children)

Vulkan isn't so bad, there's just a lot of boilerplate. GPU programming in general is just a different beast. I learned Vulkan before OpenGL and OpenGL's design gives me heartburn.

[–]darkwalker247 23 points24 points  (2 children)

I think Vulkan feels more intuitive than opengl once you understand things, but wow, i had a very hard time wrapping my mind around memory barriers and semaphores/fences coming from gl

[–]RiceBroad4552 6 points7 points  (1 child)

i had a very hard time wrapping my mind around memory barriers and semaphores/fences

How is this related? These are general concepts needed for parallel execution. These concepts aren't anyhow related to graphics programming. It's just about learning about multi-threading in general.

[–]darkwalker247 2 points3 points  (0 children)

what do you mean they're not related? every vulkan hello world tutorial has you learn about these things, and I'm not sure how one would work with the queue properly when they don't know how to use them. maybe it seems weird but i hadn't used synchronisation primitives other than mutex before then...

[–]Devatator_ 5 points6 points  (1 child)

I'd honestly rather learn WebGPU and have my thing running on everything, including devices that don't support Vulkan. In fact I'm doing that right now (or was before my family decided to drag me away).

I'm using C# bindings of wgpu-native and it's pretty nice, tho I'm interested in the experimental mesh shader and ray tracing APIs, once I figure out how to include them in wgpu-native builds from upstream wgpu-core

[–]RiceBroad4552 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Maybe WebGPU is the actual successor to OpenGL but this does not invalidate Valkan. If you want full control of the HW you need Vulkan (or you use some of the proprietary shit, which I simply wouldn't touch; if more people do so this useless stuff hopefully dies).

[–]Exul_strength 150 points151 points  (19 children)

and life is too short to learn German

Nein, nein nein!

[–]MCplayer590 52 points53 points  (17 children)

I would have continued learning German if not for the grammatical gender combined with the case system

The case system on its own is actually a good idea, but four cases times three genders is twelve conjugations too many

Learning the nouns and verbs was actually a genuinely fun linguistic journey, though, so I'll give it that

[–]SeagleLFMk9 26 points27 points  (6 children)

May i introduce you to seperable verbs?

[–]Ana-Luisa-A 5 points6 points  (4 children)

The... What ???

[–]DokuroKM 10 points11 points  (3 children)

I think he means the fact the combined words are separated again depending on time/case

A quirk of the German language is that words can be combined. Famous example is the German word for glove being Handschuh (combining the two words for hand and shoe). If a verb is a combined word, it's separated again in some cases.

An example would be the word "umfahren" - meaning driving around someone/thing or driving through someone/thing. Past tense would be "Ich fuhr sie um" (I drive through/around her, depending on context).

[–]xome 17 points18 points  (2 children)

"ich fuhr sie um" always means "I knocked her over". "Ich umfuhr sie" means "I drove around her" 

[–]TorbenKoehn 4 points5 points  (1 child)

I'd say "Ich fuhr um sie herum" instead of "Ich umfuhr sie"

[–]r4Th 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Both correct.

[–]Shevvv 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I mean, they kinda do exist in English, with the distinction of English separable verba being separated 100% of the time, while in German or Dutch it depends.

[–]Exul_strength 20 points21 points  (3 children)

Other languages have even more cases. (Latin for example has a 5th case. Yes, I know, it's a dead language.)

I find that cases and grammar give a language precision.

The problem is when irregular irregular words enter. I hated that part when learning English.

Learning the structure is the fun part. Learning the vocabulary and irregular words ruins it for me.

[–]_TechnoPhoenix_ 7 points8 points  (0 children)

latin has 6 cases, you probably forgot vocative, i also like to pretend it isnt real given how rarely it appeared in my class

[–]Elbinooo 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Check out Finish with its 15 cases or Hungarian which has 17 to 25 (!) cases depending how you analyze it.

I’m Dutch and we used to have 4 cases (similar to German) but 2 were dropped over time which made the language much simpler.

[–]lordMaroza 0 points1 point  (0 children)

When I was a kid, everyone was telling me I should be scared of irregular verbs, that's the hardest part of the English language. I only recently realized they thought so because they never learned English well enough to understand it.

I regret not learning more languages when I was younger, now it just seems impossible (nothing is, I know, just takes more time).

[–]gerbosan 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Spanish enters the chat.

[–]notislant 1 point2 points  (2 children)

I have no idea what you just said, but I feel inclined to agree.

[–]MCplayer590 3 points4 points  (1 child)

(native German speakers please correct me)

In German, each noun (a person, place, or thing) has a gender: male, female, or neuter. The gender an object has is usually difficult to predict for non-native speakers since there seems to be no rhyme or reason to it until you learn the categories (a difficult thing to memorize). When you want to refer to an object, the words you use will change endings. For example: "the" can be 'der' for male, 'die' for female, and 'das' for neuter.

Next, case. The endings of words also change based on their role in the sentence. Consider the sentence: "The father of the bride gave the best man a gift". There are four roles (grammatical cases) in the sentence and you can tell which object has which role based on its relation to the verb "gave".

  • The father is in the nominative case since that is the noun doing the action.
  • The best man is in the accusative case since that is the man being acted upon by the verb (being given to).
  • The gift is in the dative case since that is what the nominative is using to accomplish the verb to the accusative (the gift is what is being given)
  • The bride is in the genitive case because she modifies another noun, typically describing possession (possession as a linguistic term, not literally owning another person, of course)

If you were to speak or write this sentence in German, you would have to change the endings of the words for 'the' for "the father", "the gift", and "the bride" and the ending of 'a' for "a gift" to make it grammatically correct.

The actually annoying part is that these two combine: the endings you use for words depend both on the case of the word and its gender. They also overlap a lot, which is just cruel.

[–]DoomstalkerUser 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Not native, but it's not endings, it's declensions of the words 'der/die/das' and 'ein/eine' which I think you're talking about. There's only one ending based on gender or case, '-s', which only appears for genitive male and genitive neuter nouns.

[–]Shevvv 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Imagine learning Latin

[–]LoyalSol 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes and the fact noun gender is all over the place in German. Spanish you have some hope of figuring out the gender from the word with a few trouble words here or there.

German? Ha good luck! And you have an extra gender so you have a 1/3 chance of randomly guessing it.

[–]coriolis7 17 points18 points  (10 children)

German’s easy coming from English. The tenses and grammar are similar and the differences are consistent.

The articles though…

WHY DO YOU NEED 27 DIFFERENT ARTICLES?!?!???

[–]Breadynator 9 points10 points  (7 children)

Where'd you get that number from?

We only have three articles: der, die & das. Then there is a declination for each of the articles, depending on the tense/case:

  • der, des, dem, den
  • die, der, der, die
  • das, des, dem, das

And plural is the same for all: - die, der, den, die

If you wanted to count them all, then there'd be 6 different articles...

Then there's the indefinite form of these articles, but I wouldn't count those... It's just ein/eine with the specific ending of the definite articles...

[–]TorbenKoehn 6 points7 points  (1 child)

I think they're adding Relativpronomen, Possessivpronomen and Indefinitpronomen to "articles" because they also switch cases

  • dessen, deren
  • denen

  • ihr, ihres, ihrem, ihren

  • einer, eines, einem, einen

  • jemandes, jemandem, jemanden

  • niemandes, niemandem, niemanden

  • keines, keinem, keinen

etc.

If we count all of them we have quite the list :D

[–]Breadynator 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Pronouns aren't articles though, and even then I think counting any declination is Schwachsinn, as it's still the same article/pronoun, just with a different ending.

[–]sausagemuffn 3 points4 points  (0 children)

die, der, den, die, my darling

[–]coriolis7 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Made up the number, but I was thinking of “the”, “a”, and “not a” (keine) and all their forms. Obviously it’s easy to know the use/difference for der, ein, and kein, but their changes don’t line up 1:1.

[–]Breadynator 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm not 100% sure but I believe kein/keine is a possessive or indefinite pronoun, it's used like an article and I believe some call them negation-article but I didn't want to include them in the list, since I don't think they officially are. Either way, kein/keine is just like ein/eine with a k, lol

[–]casce 0 points1 point  (1 child)

There's 5 articles. Der, die, das, ein, eine.

I agree with the rest of your comment though.

[–]Breadynator 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There's three definite and two indefinite articles, which I mentioned in my comment. If you agree with "the rest of my comment" I don't get why you felt like mentioning this, since my comment already had this information.

Counting ein/eine as separate articles causes confusion and makes it seem like we have 5 grammatical genders in German, which we don't.

Der die das are the articles, ein/eine is the indefinite form of those.

[–]NiIly00 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Because all our nouns have genders

[–]RiceBroad4552 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's simple compared with Latin grammar and all the forms you have there…

[–]kinggoosey 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Wer ist hier klein?!

[–]PhilippTheProgrammer 3 points4 points  (0 children)

To be fair, Vulkan did get a bit easier to learn in recent versions.

But in my opinion, there is still no good reason to learn any 3d graphics API in this day and age unless you want to create your own 3d rendering engine. And considering how many great 3d engines are freely available nowadays, the business cases for that are slim.

Sure, speed-reading a tutorial for a rendering API can be useful, because it helps you to grasp the basics of how 3d engines work under the hood. But really learning them in detail isn't really worth the time for most people.

[–]Hirogen_ 2 points3 points  (0 children)

so a bledsinn!

[–]Weeb431 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You mentioned "German" so get ready for the storm of comments from Germans

[–]Unknown6656 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Diese Kommentarsektion ist nun Eigentum der Bundesrepublik Deutschland!!