“An Epic Cognate”
Hello everyone,
today is December the 6th, the day of St. Nikolaus, and at least in the German speaking region, that means:
Presents!
The tradition on this day is that kids shine their shoes and put them in front of the door and overnight Nikolaus comes by and fills them with some candy and gingerbread and oranges and maybe some little toys. Or, if you were a bad kid that gave the parents a hard time, you might just get a lump of coal and a note saying “FAFO! Your Nik. “.
Which is shorthand for “He who fooleth around, findeth out!”
Seriously though, it’s kind of a mini Christmas and I really liked it as a kid, and it’s a staple of the Christmas season in German speaking countries.
And so I’m really happy that I also have a little giveaway today:
A free one-month account for Cognate
But what is Cognate?
Cognate is a brand new language learning tool (webapp) that literally just launched a month ago. And what makes them special and interesting in my opinion is that they’re actually tackling one of the BIG issues that many apps and learning systems have: generic vocabulary and examples.
I’m sure you all know what I mean. You start a course or app or whatever, and you get served loads of words that you are absolutely not interested in and that you don’t need. And you practice loads of boring sentences like “Mark sees the horse.” that’ll put you to sleep.
And what’s special about Cognate, and what I haven’t seen anywhere else so far, is that they TAILOR your lessons based on your interests and goals. So if you want to study engineering at university, you learn different words than when you just want to become fit for daily conversation as quick as possible.
Actually, let’s watch their own intro video real quick:
Originally when they reached out to me, I thought it’s “just” a vocabulary trainer, but they actually also have a surprisingly large amount of grammar lessons, so it might actually be a good “learning base”.
Now, I have poked around with the app a little bit, but I am not learning German, so I’m not the best judge. I just thought the idea and approach were interesting and the team seems really nice. I mean… they even made the cute cat picture above, just for this post :).
But what really matters is how YOU like it! How well YOU think it works.
That’s why I’m really happy that the team of Cognate has offered a free one month trial account.
Now you’re like “Oh great, a giveaway, what do I have to do to enter the competition?”
But you actually can’t enter the competition, because… there is none.
The winner is already chosen and it is
EVERYONE
Yes, you all can have a free one-month premium trial, if you want to.
All you have to do is go to their homepage, create an account (you can also login with Google or Facebook) and then sign up for premium using the following code
YOURDAILYGERMAN
And that’ll be a 100% discount.
The only condition is that you actually use the site for a bit and then share your thoughts here in the comments, so I and also the folks over at Cognate get an impression of what you think and what you like and don’t like.
So yeah, here’s the link to their website:
Cognate Languages – Tailored for your needs
I’m really curious to hear your thoughts and impressions about it, even just first impressions, or if you’ve heard of a similar approach somewhere else already, so let me know!
Have fun playing around, happy Nikolaus and I’ll see you tomorrow.
Ps.:
Just to make sure… it is a webapp at the moment, so it runs in the browser. No Playstore or app store. It’s a really new product and a small team and developing a “real” app is quite costly if you want to do it right, and also, you then have to pay 30% of your sales just to be in the app stores.
wpDiscuz
