Yourdailygerman Cryptic Calendar
“2 4 1”
♥♥♥♥♥
♥♥♥♥
♥
2 lessons per month are for free.
If you want more – why not become a member!
As a member, you can study as much as you want and find lots of information you won’t find anywhere else. Not in class, not in a textbook and not Duolingo or Youtube.
And you’ll have unimited access to all grammar practice tools, pronunciation practice and my writing correction tool.
***
Already a member?
Log in here:
Already a member? Log in here
Audio Speed
Dark Mode
yarrooh! 100% with only one guess. (the lang and lange). Thanks that was helpful
Glückwunsch :)!
I’m a very lapsed German student (I reached B1 about nine months ago, then life got in the way of my studies) and I got all of these correct. The only word I wasn’t familiar with was ‘eng’ but I knew ‘fest’. thanks for this fun quiz that made me feel like I haven’t forgotten everything I’ve learned.
I’m sure you haven’t!! It’s a bit like running and then not running for a couple of years. The first few times picking it up again SUCK, but your body (and brain) still remembers. It just needs to load “german.exe” and that takes a while.
Is schwer vs schwierig a regional thing? In Salzburg I nearly always hear schwierig, and schwer seems to mainly be used for heavy.
My area too!
What area is that (just for reference :)
Very well possible. Though Salzburg is in Österreich and anything I say here on the blog about usage of words, can always be different in Austria.
Yeah I try to bear it in mind when I read your posts that there could be some things that are different here. But I have resigned myself to the idea that my German will be a hot mess of mainly Hochdeutsch but with English words and Dialekt words thrown in. And my pronounciation is apparently quite good, but then i have to say a word like “wichtigste” and I sound like a child still learning to talk ^^
And the fun part is… that’ll probably never change :D. (unless you get professional speech training, or you put in a LOT Of effort.)
My first ever 100% Yay
Fluency achieved :)!
Großartiges Quiz!
Fun breakfast activity. Next time could you please give us the German phrase. I’d forgotten the idiomatic ‘hold tight’ and I depend on you for everyday acceptable German. Is it Halte fest or Halte dich fest …?
Thank you too for the acknowledgement that a single German word can have a number of different meanings. The Google translate thesaurus can be quite overwhelming in that respect as everything seems to leak into everything else.- but according to an unseen logic. That’s where reading a lot helps, I suppose.
All best and thanks for continuing to be entertaining and informative as well as useful .
Yeah, I was kind of in a rush for this one.
As for festhalten vs sich festhalten…
– Halt fest!
This implies that you’re holding something else and the purpose is to fixate that.
– Halt dich fest.
Here, you’re holding on to something else and the purpose is that you don’t fall.
All these multiple possible translations for one word are actually one of the reasons why Google translate to German is still a lot poorer than from English to Spanish.
But their AI will figure it out in time :).
Got it. Thank you.
I also found the following query and answers useful.
Would you be able to introduce some kind of like function so we can show which questions and answers interested and helped us ?It’s boring to do a Reply that’s jus a thankyou but I often feel quite unappreciative.
I think I can activate a “thumb up” function for the comments, but all that stuff increases the load time for the server and I don’t really want to get these notifications anyway :).
Don’t worry about not saying thank you. The fact that people take time to ask questions is appreciation enough!
Okay.
The extra server activity did occur to me too. I do find some of the other comments and queries really interesting in ways that take us to new realms and I’d liketo be able to acknowledge that …but I respect your decision.
PS the drag/drop on Q5 in today’s (advent day 13 ) didn’t work on my tablet though the previous d/d did.
The thing is that I have this “rate article” feature under the article, and not even 5 percent of people reading it use it.
I expect the ration to be even less for comments. So I’d turn on a feature for thousands of comments that then only a few people ever use for a few comments.
A computer doesn’t know that, though, they will check for every single comment each time in the database.
What do you mean about previous “d/d”? I mean… when did it work? I am pretty sure it did work a year ago, otherwise I wouldn’t have used this question type and now I find out it doesn’t work on mobile anymore, not just iPad :/.
Did you get one that worked in like the last few weeks? That’d be very weird then.
Hello,
No typos today! And a topic that’s not “umstritten” :)
I got the last one wrong, the others I found easy. When I got to lang/lange, I was very unsure, I hesitated a lot and after dragiing and dropping and swapping a few times, I thought, ok, 50/50 chance, leave it as it is now… it was WRONG… but at least now I understand why.
These words whose difference is the letter at the end confuse me a lot, z.B. allein/alleine (which has nothing to do with gender, oder?) and die beiden/beide/beides (have never managed to figure out what the difference is…).
Bis morgen!
Oh, and I just thought of gern/gerne. I know they’re the same but I have the gut feeling that gerne is almost always used when preceded by sehr or used on its own, whereas gern is left e-less when the sentence has no sehr/other words… But I could be entirely wrong ;)
A lot depends on how the speaker feels like.
I tend to use “gerne” as a stand alone or if I am dragging out my speech for some reason. Or at the end of a sentence, when it has an emphasis. “gern” on the other hand, I’d use in a normal quick sentence mid way.
It’s the rhythm that makes it for me.
That said, there might be a few phrasings where “gerne” sounds awkward. i just can’t think of them right now.
I feel like a phrase like “Ich schwimme gern” or “Ich spiele gern Klavier” would be really weird with “gerne” instead of “gern”.
Not for me, especially not the “schwimme” one. But “gerne” does sound a wee bit childish. Sticking with “gern” is totally fine.
No typos?! Okay, so now it is confirmed… the less time I spend writing, the fewer typos there will be.
This post was a kind of last minute churn out.
As for “beide” vs “beides”… Amerikanskan asked the same, and I answered there :).
For “alleine” and “allein”, there’s a great deal of “how the speaker feels like” to it. Definitely not a difference to worry about.
Speaking of same, same but different, would it be possible to get an explanation for the different between beide and beides? Beides is singular and beide is plural, got that, but I can’t seem to get a feel for what is meant by if the two things discussed are the same or not. Like, if they belong to the same group. (Menschen sind immer beide/plural). The info I have, z.B. https://hooktube.com/watch?v=ILy08BMsqOE is confusing: chocolate and gummi bears are different: beides. (but both are candy, not like I’m choosing between Chocolate and Pasta). Red vs white gummi bears is beide – both are gummi bears, but different colors. Um, how to know where the line goes to be the same? Gummi bears, candy, food? Who decides this? Kinda the same feeling as this Türchen, same, same but different.
Great question!!
I immediately started thinking about it and didn’t get anywhere but then I read on and the source did give me a good start.
I kind of disagree with it, though. I think I’d still say “beide” for your example, and I’d definitely say “beide” if we pit “Wein” against “Bier”. So as you say… where’s the boundary there?
Then I tried one of my favorite dychotomies… entities (things, beings) vs actions.
And voila… that is a VERY good guide.
Things and beings tend to use “beide” (with outliers of course), and two activities, two courses of action would use “beides”.
– Laufen gehen oder Netflix gucken. Beides klingt gut.
– Alles haben wir versucht, nichts hat funktioniert.
If we were talking about items here, it might be “alle” and “kein-”
Does that help?
Leider, nicht. If you see the film I linked in my comment and then perhaps even German wif’ Jenny’s then you’ll see that the humans are Beide but the way they discuss what is Beides is difficult to understand regarding where the line between same and different goes.
https://hooktube.com/watch?v=eb03gtUP0oc
Yeah, so I started watching German wif (:D, love it) Jenny (at 1,75 speed) and I absolutely disagree with what she is saying.
The example with the lawnmower and the hedge trimmer, I would use “beide” fo’ so’.
Same for the example with the cable and the phone. And same for the ring and the painting.
And besides… ” a lawnmower and a hedge trimmer are two different things”.
Okay, but she would agree that for “Katze” and “Hund” it would be “beide”. But okay, those are living beings.
But I think she would also agree that for “tree” and “flower” we’d say “beide sind schön” and not “beides”. But okay, both are living things.
And I’m pretty sure she’d also agree that if I asked her what she liked better, the mountains or the sea, she would say “Ich mag beide” and NOT “beides”.
So gradually, I have moved the goalpost toward two clearly NOT living entities.
She says “We HAVE to use beides”, like it’s a rule. I think, she just read it up somewhere and is regurgitating what she read without ever checking how well it actually holds up with how people talk.
(can you tell I don’t like her :D)
What she is right about is that “beides” is used when you talk about two activities.
But the rest of her examples are typical teacher nonsense.
Awww, I love German wif’ Jenny! She is the epitome of a German Aspie, and she really loves spreading her love for the language and her own learning tricks – she’s a real Mensch (in the Yiddish sense of the word).
Her videos are really well done, she puts a lot of time and effort into what she does, and does it well. Ok, so she’s not everyone’s cuppa tea but she is very helpful.
Thanks for the input on Beide/Beides.
So I know watched “Fröhlich Deutsch” (which I like way better than Jenny) and her examples for “beides” also suck.
The example with the declension… “Ich finde beide schwer” is absolutely idiomatic.
Actually, no guarantee… I didn’t do any research. I just checked what “feels” right. So now you can start observing if my thesis matches reality :)
That was fun! I got them right but I didn’t always know why, and lange was just a guess, so the explanations were helpful.
12 outta 12 – easy peasy HOWEVER: figuring out where to put the words starting with the second que was more difficult. The “drop” field in question 1 was the entire empty space, when I got to the second and third, I didn’t “get” the red, dotted line indicated that the drop field had been moved to the right (rechts) and had to write my answers on a piece of paper and then check. By question number four, ist es mir eingefallen, that the dotted, red line might mean something…
Meine Fresse! Wie blöd kann nur ein Weib sein? Naja,
Diese Quiz/Tests sind supi – die Wörter sind so ähnlich, dass man halt tägliche Übung benötigt, damit den “ähnliche Wort-Muskel” fit zu halten.
As an “A1 wanna be” I’m happy with my 5/6. Lang/Lange was a guess (wrong). The others I either knew or ‘felt’ strongly about with no actual facts for why one was correct. I personally like these quizzes on the site. And I liked the explanations you gave for the answers.
Lang/Lange. Think Fritz Lang, famous (in his day or if you’re a film buff) German FILM producer.
So a “Film” is “lang”.. nice one :)
What do you mean A1 wanna be :). You’re most likely a rock solid A1, if there’s ever been one!