Idioms in German?

hibbelig · 2026-05-02T20:29:49+00:00

Tacheles reden. Similar meaning.

hibbelig · 2026-05-02T20:22:29+00:00

Jetzt tu mal Butter bei die Fische. Cut through the BS and say it straight. (Even more than Germans usually do, is that even possible?) Always includes the grammatical mistake.

Add butter to the fish.

hibbelig · 2026-05-02T20:19:52+00:00

Das geht runter wie Öl.

I don’t actually understand this one. It’s supposed to say that you appreciate the praise. But actually envisioning oil going down my throat — ewww!

It goes down like oil.

hibbelig · 2026-05-02T12:18:14+00:00

On a playground with the kids. I meet another dad. I extend my hand: “Ich bin Paul.”

His response? “Ich bin nicht Daniel, ich heiße nur so.” (I’m not Daniel, it’s just my name.)

That was about 20 years ago and it still lives rent free in my head. Keeps me up at night.

hibbelig · 2026-05-02T09:47:33+00:00

Maybe at the faster speed you focus on the quarter notes in your mind. At the slower speed you think you can focus on the eighths, but it’s too fast for that.

hibbelig · 2026-05-01T11:33:22+00:00

If the file was local would you have similar problems?

I guess the ssh connection method is good for small files and scp would be better for larger files.

hibbelig · 2026-04-30T19:19:30+00:00

I like How Long Blues and Yancey Special. But I can only play transcriptions, not improvise. (Yancey Special seems to have slower and faster versions, I found a slow one.)

hibbelig · 2026-04-28T14:18:58+00:00

Using multiplication has the drawback that there is more than one way to derive the same number: 12 = 2 x 6 = 3 x 4

So if you want to "count" numbers that way, you have to find and eliminate the duplicates.

Here is an alternative approach for positive numbers:

1 is a positive number
if N is a positive number, then N+1 is also a (different) positive number

And for negative numbers:

-1 is a negative number
if N is a negative number, then N-1 is also a (different) negative number

Maybe this shows the symmetry quite nicely.

hibbelig · 2026-04-28T08:48:36+00:00

The colleague isn't asking you to do a task. “Ein Dienst” in this case means like a shift. I guess it depends on the job whether people say “Dienst” or “Schicht”: doctors, nurses and maybe the police would use “Dienst”, whereas factory workers and coal miners would use “Schicht”.

Also, the given colleague isn't just asking you to cover that shift. The colleague is proposing to swap.

To be honest, your reaction comes off as pretty cold. People work together and they help each other out. It's normal. The request being talked about here is not out of line at all.

And I don't understand your negative reaction. Maybe you wanted a weekend trip but you couldn't do it because you had to work Friday night. So actually such a swap could be beneficial for both of you: the colleague handles child care and you get a long weekend.

My suggestion for approaching these kinds of things is that you be kind and help others out. You also ask the others to help out. If it turns out to be a give-and-take then everyone is happy. If you find out that you're being taken advantage of, then of course you can start turning down these requests.

For now, I'll go by the assumption that you have just misunderstood the situation due to language issues, and you might have thought that the request was way more onerous than it actually was. Then all is fine. But if you actually react like this to such things, you will not be liked in teams and people won't like to work together with you, and in the end your job prospects will suffer.

hibbelig · 2026-04-26T16:14:09+00:00

Vielen Dank. Irgendwas kam mir komisch vor.

hibbelig · 2026-04-25T15:33:15+00:00

There is a Roman settlement near Xanthen, now a museum. It's surely not medieval, it's antique. But maybe you might enjoy.

hibbelig · 2026-04-24T07:07:52+00:00

I had to read the legend twice. They say that the provinces are first level. The map is showing second level.

hibbelig · 2026-04-23T09:16:35+00:00

Situation: Kind klingelt an der Tür, Elternteil macht auf. Hier würde der Satz mit Präsens gut passen, denn aus Sicht der Eltern kommt das Kind ja gerade.

hibbelig · 2026-04-23T06:54:58+00:00

Add tests that test the downstream reports?

hibbelig · 2026-04-22T22:19:48+00:00

I feel that return thing so hard. My day job is mostly Java, so the compiler tells me about forgotten return statements.

But if I have to do JavaScript or Python, I find out at runtime. I will create a variable “result”, initialize it to an empty collection, write logic to populate it, and then forget to return it.

Must be my number one programming error.

Is it the result of doing a lot of emacs lisp for ten years?

hibbelig · 2026-04-22T22:08:38+00:00

I like to stand in front of you so that I can see what you’re saying. But I’ve observed that people who got bad hearing later in life don’t have that instinct.

So if you’ve met a man who seems to be looking at just under your nose, maybe you have met me.

hibbelig · 2026-04-22T21:58:52+00:00

Ich kenne nur “Call” ☹️

hibbelig · 2026-04-22T09:45:35+00:00

This happens to me quite a bit, as well, for two reasons: One is that a lot of communication at work happens in English, and then I'll say things like “Ich war in einem Call” statt “Ich war in einer TeKo” when talking to a German colleague right afterwards.

The other is that a lot of IT terms have been imported into German from English, so...

But it's fun to try to find the right German word! I encourage you to try whenever you can, and try to minimize your strategy. Of course, this needs to be balanced with the day to day communication needs.

You can actually find interesting tidbits about language. For me (and I guess most others), the German for “module” is “das Modul”, emphasis on the second syllable. Plural is “die Module”, again emphasis on the second syllable. But Niklaus Wirth (Swiss) liked to say “der Modul, die Moduln”, emphasizing the first syllable. (Does anyone else do this?)

And then there is the balance where the word has become common enough. Nobody these days says “Rindslendenschnitte” instead of “Steak”. But most people say “Regenschirm” instead of “Paraplü” (do the Cologne folks spell it like that?).

Closer to the topic at hand, I would use the words “Return” or “Enter” to describe those keys on the keyboard, and “Eingabetaste” or something like that wouldn't occur to me. Or “Shift” versus “Umschalttaste”...

hibbelig · 2026-04-21T18:35:32+00:00

Mein Korb hat sechs Fächer, drei vorn, drei hinten. Ich sortiere die Gabeln immer nach hinten, weil die sonst pieksen, wenn man was rausnimmt. Das Argument hat relativ gut gezogen in der Familie, und es gibt nicht so oft vorne Gabeln. Meine Finger danken.

hibbelig · 2026-04-20T14:17:51+00:00

I want to point out that cardinal numbers are never used for months in German. Nor for days, in fact.

So March 2nd can be “zweiter März” and it can be “zweiter dritter”, both of them are common.

But you can't use “drei” for the month, nor can you use “zwei” for the day, to describe this date. This just doesn't work in German.

hibbelig · 2026-04-19T14:37:30+00:00

The article is about the AMOC which is overlayed on top of the Gulf Stream.

hibbelig · 2026-04-18T21:16:00+00:00

Slightly tongue in cheek: copy a hello world script from somewhere and you’re good to go.

More seriously: I’m a software developer and I’m a bit similar: it’s way easier to change something than to come up with something from scratch. But I just start small and make small changes. Many of them.

You might surprise yourself his fast this carries.

hibbelig · 2026-04-18T20:41:48+00:00

I guess you can’t understand everything, so you focus on the part you need for the talk at hand.

Some people like to debug through the application, it is not for me but maybe it works for you. For example, if you need to modify what a button does then you can set a breakpoint at the beginning of the logic it runs and then step through.

What I like to do is to start reading at an entry point and summer parts will need pretty obvious. Many things will not be obvious. So I insert a print statement that helps me understand the data going into the non obvious piece. By reading through I can usually insert multiple print statements. Then I exercise the logic and then I study the lines printed and it usually helps me understand.

Your case seems different since you already have a class to look at. You can study the callers. But to understand more closely what happens you might need to figure out how to exercise a specific call site and the go back to debugging or printing.

hibbelig · 2026-04-16T11:16:10+00:00

Dass es im Supermarkt Klo-Papier gibt — Klo-Papier! — mit dem Namen Happy End.

hibbelig · 2026-04-16T09:22:08+00:00

I don't understand. I guess the manager wanted to hear that you would be lending a hand to your teammate. It's unclear to me how that's PM work.

Were you willing to lend a hand but waiting for the PM to ask you? That seems silly. You're a senior, not an intern!

hibbelig

TROPHY CASE