Reading Your Stories 3 – Dankbarkeit

Hello everyone,

and welcome to the third episode of

Reading Your Stories

For those of you who are new here – in each episode of this series, I take one short text that one of you has sent me, and I correct it and comment on why I made the corrections that I made, so you can learn from the mistakes.
And I also read out the corrected version and give you a line by line translation to English as well.
So you can use this to practice listening, reading and if you want to you can also try to find the mistakes yourself, and practice some grammar that way :).

Today’s story, called “Dankbarkeit” comes from Parul and not only does it contain a bunch of interesting mistakes and sentences, it also has a really beautiful and inspiring message, and I am really happy to share it with you all.

So are you ready to jump in?
Then let’s go!

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Word of the Day – “strecken”

In this episode:

"strecken" and "dehnen" both mean "to stretch". Today, we'll find out the difference and explore the other words in the family of strecken

Vocab:   

strecken, die Strecke, ausstrecken, erstrecken, vorstrecken, vollstrecken, dehnen, die Dehnung,...

Hello everyone,

and welcome to our German word of the Day. This time with a look at the meaning of

streckn

Oh… sorry… I had something stuck in my throat.
So yeah, today we’ll look at

strecken

 

Wow, they almost sound the same. How funny.
Seriously though, I’m sure many of you have come across strecken in one form or another, but chances are also that you never really spent much time looking into the family.
And that’s exactly what we’ll do today, because there are some nice words to be found. And we’ll also look at the difference between strecken and dehnen, which … uh… you probably never wondered about. But hey, it’s a thing now :)
So… let’s jump in.

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2 cool new AI tools

Hello everyone,

how is it going :)?
So a couple of weeks ago, I showed you the example generator tool that I made with ChatGPT.
It then had a bug for quite a while, but now it’s working again and I’ve also improved it a little bit.
But not only that – I also created two new tools for you.
Drumroll please….

  • AI Story Generator
  • AI Proofreader

And I’ll show you both of them today, so  let’s take a look :). Continue reading

“ab” -Prefix, Preposition, Father, Nerd – INFJ

Hello everyone,

and welcome to part two of our look at the meaning of the prefix and preposition

ab

Last time, we learned about the origin of ab and family of ab and got to see some of its surprising relatives.
Next, we got to know its two core themes, which are:

  1. separation, away
  2. downward

And then we started looking at ab- as a verb prefix and learned the idea of downward is kind of irrelevant there, because virtually all prefix verbs are based on the theme of separation, away.
And then we started looking at examples for ab-verbs and how the one core idea is used in practice. So far, we saw some obvious examples and some that had a little twist to them.
If you haven’t read part one yet, you can find it here:

German Prefixes Explained – “ab”

What’s missing still are the really abstract examples. The ones where it’s not clear at all how they relate to the core idea of away.
And by the way – guess what abstract is! It’s a combination of ab- and a Latin verb for dragging, and it literally means “pull away from”.
So yeah… that’s where we’ll pick up today, and once we’re done with that, we’ll talk how ab is used as a preposition and we’ll see if there are any fixed prefix verb combinations we need to be aware of.

And because the entire intro so far was incredibly dry, lets wrap it up with a little joke – ChatGPT, take it away:

A screenshot of an unfanny joke by chatgpt

Amazing!!
The future is has arriv… what?… Oh, not funny?
Oh, uhm… let me think … uh….  and this?

Still no?
Man, tough crowd.
I’m out of ideas.
But it’s time we jump in and learn some German anyway, so let’s go….

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