Motivation

Our motivation was to create a website that would be helpful for beginners in German and for anyone who's interested in learning German. The purpose of this website is to introduce the user to some background about the German language, show why it's interesting to study, introduce some basic grammar, and finally provide a visualization tool for analyzing gender patterns and plural formation patterns in German. We decided to focus on gender patterns and plural patterns in particular since these are two areas where the rules aren't always so clear and students of German must often dedicate time memorizing the gender and plurals for individual nouns.

Design Rationale

To introduce the viewer to the German language, we created an interactive visualization of cognates to show the relationship between English and German, an interactive activity showing some fun and interesting German words, and a map illustrating the distribution of German speakers and learners around the world. We created a bubble chart for the cognates visualization with the color encoding showing the origin language, and we also made the bubbles draggable to let the user play around with the words and reorganize them as they want. The user can also hover over the bubbles to guess which English word is related to the German words, therefore engaging the user to use their previous knowledge of English as well as a fun bit of guessing. For the fun words visualization, our goal was to pique the user's interest in German and engage them with a fun game where they look at the parts of the compound word and guess the meaning of the full word. The purpose of the map was to visualize the number of German speakers and learners around the world and give the user an idea of where German is spoken and which countries are most interested in learning it.

For the gender patterns visualization, we identified a list of common noun endings and used these endings to look for patterns in the gender of the nouns. Since there are 3 gender categories for German nouns and the noun endings may not completely correspond to one gender 100% of the time, we used a ternary plot which allows us to effectively encode the continuous percentages of word endings tend to fall under the three gender category. Word endings with more robust correlations to a certain ending will appear at the corners of the plot, while more problematic endings with looser correlations to a certain gender fall near the middle. For the plural patterns visualization, we created a Sankey diagram so that the user can clearly see which singular endings map to which plural endings, as well as the frequency of these pairings. The user can also click on a singular or plural ending on the Sankey diagram to select it and filter the data shown in the bubble chart and the pie chart on the right.

Data Processing

In order to create these visualizations, we found the data for the most common German nouns including plural forms and gender, German loanwords into English, native German speakers per country, and German learners per country. We formatted and processed the data in Python and converted the data to json.

Showcase Video

Team Members