Advent Calendar 2025

German Advent Calendar – Day 24

  “Frohe Weihnachten”   We made it, wohoo – Advent Calendar 2025 is a wrap! Merry Christmas everyone! Frohe Weihnachten. Vielen Dank for being here for the calendar and for all your comments, question and support. I really hope you enjoyed it this year even if I couldn’t do some of the more time intensive staples like the Oracle riddle. I did enjoy it and I might just wing it again next year. I really hope you had some fun with it and learned a few things. For now, have an amazing Christmas, with lots of love presents, good food and may you absolutely own your family in those political dinner table discussions :). Have a great time, wind down and relax. And if you have to work, have some relaxing or inspiring shifts. And if you don’t celebrate Christmas but live in a country that does… enjoy the quiet. The city is never as quiet as around Christmas and it’s kind of fascinating. Anyway, I’ll stop yapping now. Have an amazing Christmas and bis bald.  

German Advent Calendar – Day 23

“Let’s Play”   Hello everyone, Welcome to day number 23 of the Advent Calendar. And today, I have something REALLY special for you, and something you can maybe spend some time over the holidays: Sneak Peek of my New Game   Back in fall, I tried out a new type of quiz for learning noun gender. The basic idea was that you don’t pick the article for a noun, but rather you pick the noun for an article. I’ve described my idea and the added benefits in more detail in that article, so if you want to check it out, you can find it here: German Noun Gender – New Type Of Exercise   The feedback from you was overwhelmingly positive, and I really do think there’s some potential there and so I have made that into a game. And today, you can test it.

German Advent Calendar – Day 22

“Let’s Order” Hello everyone, Welcome to day number 22 of this year’s Advent Calendar. The final stretch. And since it’s Monday again, let’s get active one last time and do a little quiz, this time about Word Order Now, in prior calendars, I’ve often had a word order exercise where I would give you a group of single short sentences that you had to combine into one big one. Which is fun and a great practice but it’s super duper work intensive for me because it really works best if you all get individual feedback for each of your versions. The general problem with word order exercises is that there usually isn’t THE ONE correct solution. Especially once a sentence a moderate length, there can be a DOZEN of correct versions, and the differences are often very fine and highly contextual. That’s hard to capture in an exercise and sadly, AI is not reliable enough to navigate all these subtleties either. But anyway… today, I want to try out a new type of exercise that is basically built around the fact that there’s more than one correct answer.  

German Advent Calendar – Day 21

  “Two Doors with one Day”   Hello everyone, And welcome back to day number 21 of the Advent Calendar. You might have noticed that day 20 was missing and that’s because I was outside running errands pretty much all day yesterday and when I got home I was so tired that I really couldn’t focus. So we’ll get two treats today, essentially. Hooray :) And both of them are nothing special and very special at the same time.

German Advent Calendar – Day 19

“Lore Accuracy” Hello everyone, Day number 19 of the Advent calendar, we’re slowly approaching the final stretch. And behind today’s door is another round of German Language – Myth or Fact We already did one episode toward the beginning of the calendar but there are quite a few stories flowing around out there in the German learning sphere, not all of which are true, so I really wanted to do another one of these. The idea is that I make a claim about the German language and its grammar and you have to decide whether or not this is actually true. If you get it right – well, great. You know that aspect of German well. And if you get it wrong – well great, you just learned something :). And maybe I can even bust one or the other myth that you might have heard somewhere on YouTube or Reddit and you actually think it’s true. Like last time, you’ll be earning angel number points, which is of course an amazing additional benefit. So if you’re ready, let’s jump in.

German Advent Calendar – Day 18

“Bookmark it”   Hello everyone, Willkommen zurück zum Adventskalender, Tag Nummer 18. And behind today’s door are two potentially new addition to everyone’s Bookmark Cemetery That’s right. I have Two websites you can bookmark and then forget about, for such is the fate of recommendations hither, thence, and forevermore. Seriously though, I had collected quite a few recommendations for this Advent calendar, some of which I am not so hot about anymore, but these two are definitely useful each in its own way. And they’re very different in purpose, as well as in style.

German Advent Calendar – Day 17

  “Inferring, Combining, Intuiting, Solving”   Hello everyone, Welcome back to the Advent Calendar, door number 17. And today, it’s time for a bit of activity again with another little Wortschatz-Quiz We’ve already done this type of quiz once this season and I feel like a lot of you enjoyed the format so we’ll do a a second round today. I’ll give you four “orbit words” that all circle around a common core. For example: die Bohne (bean) mahlen (grind) das Koffein (awake) süchtig ( addicted) The word these “orbit” around is der Kaffee. Your task is to find this word and then… ugh.. TYPE IT. Now, the “orbit words” are often a bit on the less known side. That’s kind of the goal of this practice, to see some vocabulary you DON’T know in context. Just that you need to actually figure out the context yourself ;). The main goal though is that you enjoy the puzzling and thinking.

German Advent Calendar – Day 16

“K ein I nteresse?!”   Hello everyone, Welcome back to our Advent Calendar, day number 16. Wohoo! And today, I actually kind of want to talk with you a bit about a topic that many of you are on the fence about but that most of you will not be able to avoid in one way or the other: AI in German Learning I think at this point all of you have at least heard about these new technologies and have at least a cursory idea what they do. What I want to do today is give a little overview of HOW they’re influencing German learning, whether you want it or not, and then, I’d like to do a quick poll to get an idea how you as a community are using the new tools and how you feel about them. And then, I’d of course love to talk more in the comments. My thoughts here ended up quite lengthy, so if you don’t care about this or you don’t have time and instead want to jump right to the poll and the discussion in the comments, you can do that here :) AI in Language Learning – Your Opinions … <a href="https://yourdailygerman.com/kriki-cartoon-artist-berlin-my-inspiration/">Dive in <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>

German Advent Calendar – Day 15

“Let Prefix Rain” Hallo ihr alle, Welcome to the third week of the Advent Calendar. Wohoo! Day number 15, Monday. And just like last Monday, we’ll kick the week off with a little exercise. This time, with a quiz about Prefix Versions of “lassen” This is a classic quiz type of the Advent Calendar, and it’s famous for being “the dream crusher”. You go in, thinking you worked hard on your German, and then you score like 30% or something and feel absolutely deflated. I mean… is there a better way to start the week? Sure. But do we care? No! We are learning GERMAN after all. We thrive on hardship and pain! And also, this year’s quiz has more learning value because I have added explanations to each of the answers. I started doing this this year, and definitely takes longer to set up a quiz, but I think it makes a HUGE difference in how valuable the quiz is. After all, the purpose of quizzes in learning is to LEARN, not to SCORE. So yeah… don’t go into this thinking you need to “score” and if you score low, then your German is bad in this particular aspect. … <a href="https://yourdailygerman.com/kriki-cartoon-artist-berlin-my-inspiration/">Dive in <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>

German Advent Calendar – Day 14

“Very Helpful Stuff” Hello everyone, Welcome back, Advent Calendar 2025, day number 14, the third Advent actually. And behind today’s door is a resource for German learners that is not only super useful but it’s also completely free. Sounds like a bit like a setup for some kind of twist. But I’m not joking.

German Advent Calendar – Day 13

“Break Tradition” Hello everyone, Day 13 of the Advent Calendar and behind this door is… drumroll… The traditional break If you’ve been following the calendar for a while, you probably know that there’s always one day that’s just a plain break, so everyone including me can catch up a bit. Usually, it’s a bit later in the calendar, but I was travelling today and so I decided to do it today :) So yeah… have an amazing day everyone, habt einen tollen Tag, und wir sehen uns morgen.  

German Advent Calendar – Day 12

“German Humor I like” Hello everyone, And welcome to day number 12 of the Advent Calendar. And behind today’s door is An Artist A cartoon artist, to be precise, whose work has heavily inspired how I started out making cartoons for my articles here back when I was still stitching together pencil drawn elements. Today, I want to introduce you to him, because he was such an influence for me, and I still find him funny in a subversive way even after almost 30 years. And if you like cartoons, it might be a nice source to learn  with, at least if you’re B1 or higher.

German Advent Calendar – Day 11

  “Also always”   Hello everyone, Welcome back to day number 11 of the Advent Calendar and behind today’s door is a useful little word combination that doesn’t quite mean what it seems to mean: auch immer One of you actually asked me about this yesterday, because it didn’t make sense in context and that’s when I realized how weird this actually is. And since it’s a somewhat common pattern that also has a variation that’s even more confusing, I decided to share that right away today. So… just based on the parts, auch immer looks like it means also always. or always as well. And it can mean that… Maria kommt immer zu spät. Thomas kommt auch immer zu spät. Maria is always late. Thomas is also always late.   But then, there are sentences like this: Wo auch immer du bist, ich bin hier. And here, thinking of auch as also and immer as always makes NO sense.

Advent Calendar – 10

“Duolingo, but it doesn’t suck” Hello everyone, a bit late today, but welcome back to the German learning Advent Calendar 2025, door number 10. And behind this door is the first recommendation for a language tool for this season. LingoDeer Yeah… I know… LingoDeer, lingopie, langotalk, lingodies, langodas. There are so many apps now that the names start getting confusing. But today, I want to tell you about LingoDeer because it’s basically what Duolingo could be if they took the idea of teaching someone a language seriously.

Advent Calendar – 9

“You know what… you’re good!”   Hello everyone, Welcome back!! Door number 9 of the 2025 Advent Calendar and behind this door is a little vocabulary snack waiting for you that I’m almost sure 90% of you don’t know. There’s words that just fly below the radar, but this one.. this one is a 6th generation stealth jet. Stealth… I wasn’t too sure about stealth, but this is tremendously stealth, I can tell you that. They say it’s so much stealth, they can’t find it, even if they’re looking for it. I don’t know about that. I’ve seen it. It’s hard to see, but I’ve seen it. Very few people see it, but it’s nice when you see it. It’s very nice, in fact. It’s beautiful, frankly. Okay, seriously though, today I want to tell you about…. die Kulanz And before we take a look at it, I actually want to check my hypothesis about how many of you know this, so here’s a little poll:     And now, let’s take a look.  

German Advent Calendar – 8

  “The sum of its parts” Hello everyone, and welcome to door number 8 – the second week of the Advent Calendar is starting. And what better way to kick off the week than with a little bit of activity. A Vocabulary Quiz Today, I want to try out a new type of quiz that might be useful for building vocabulary. I’m curious what you’ll think. Here’s how it works:

German Advent Calendar – Day 7

“Did you mean”   Hello ihr Deutschlerner, I’m a bit late today, but happy second Advent I hope you had or are having a beautiful day. Today, I have a little site improvement for you, but I also have a couple of follow ups from the days prior. First of all, I want to say that I’m REALLY impressed by the poems you wrote about German prefix verbs. They were all really really creative and some were actually really impressive. And I have to say…

German Advent Calendar – Day 6

  “It’s in the cards”   Hello everyone,   and welcome to this year’s German Learning Advent Calendar. Today is Saturday, which is traditionally a “slow” day for the calendar, and it’s also the 6th of December, which means it is Nikolaus-Tag. Nikolaus is a sort of mini Christmas in Germany and many other countries, where kids get some little goodies and coworkers bring self-made Plätzchen to work.And so today is the perfect day for a little Give-Away Hooray!

German Advent Calendar – Day 5

  “Anne, Aufer, Zues”   Hello everyone, And welcome back to this year’s German learning calendar, door number five, and it arguably has the most obscure title so far. I mean… Anne, Aufer, Zues. Looks a bit like it could be names, but it isn’t. What it is is a bit of colloquial German for you that you absolutely won’t find in a textbook, but that you MIGHT come across in real life here and that might be very, very confusing. Let’s look at an actual example and see if you can figure it out :)

German Advent Calendar – Day 4

“Not beating the allegations” Hallo ihr alle, Welcome to day number 4 of this year’s Advent Calendar. And today, I want to talk about a very common stereotype people have about Germans and Germany. Germans “don’t do AC” By AC I mean of course air conditioning and there’s the stereotype that Germans are not really into it. Make sure to stay until the end of the article to find out if it’s true or not, but first…

German Advent Calendar 25 – Day 3

  “If Hmpf was a person”   Hello everyone, Welcome to day 3 of the Advent Calendar, and behind today’s door is… drumroll… a word. der Muffel Looks a bit like muff, which is this sort of fur tube that you can put both hands into in winter. It’s also called der Muffe in German, by the way. The word comes from the French word moufle which just means glove. Anyway,  der Muffel  has nothing to do with keeping your hands warm, but it still is a very useful word especially if you spend your winter in Berlin. We have Muffel aplenty here, muffeling around, spreading their Muffeligkeit. You may even become one. Heck, you probably ARE one, for one thing or another. Like sports, or reading, or taking a shower So what is it?

German Advent Calendar – Day 2

  “Truth or Nah”   Hello everyone, And welcome to day two of this years Advent Calendar and today we’ll do a little quiz about Truths about the German Language Sounds harmless, but you’ll actually have to do some serious thinking. Or some serious knowing. Or some serious guessing. Either way, it’s definitely very serious.

German Advent Calendar – Day 1

  “Same, same, but different” Give me an A! Give me a D! Give me an H! Give me a D! What’s that spell? It spells… oh… uh… Advent Calendar 2025, let’s goooo!! Seriously, welcome to the epic YourDailyGerman German learning Advent Calendar 2025