German Advent Calendar – Day 18

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.

The first one is a register of German idioms and expressions

A Registry for German Expressions

Of course there are many lists of German idioms and expressions online. Wikipedia has a very big one , but that one kind of sucks because there are no examples and the formatting is really not helping.

Wiktionary has a huge list, which looks much better as a list and has examples and often also info about where the expression comes from, but you have to open every single entry and I’m not really a fan of how it’s all formatted.

In my opinion, the best option (and the one I use if I need this stuff) is Redensarten-index.de .

It’s a registry specifically for German expressions and idioms and with over 15.000 entries.
Now, the top of the site looks a lot like the web used to look in the 18th century, but once you scroll past the menu and the various ad banners, the display of the search result is AMAZING.

It presents the idiom on a sort of card where it shows the meaning, often adds one or more examples AND sometimes also information about where it comes from.
And next to that is a list of all idioms found for a certain search.
Here’s a screenshot where I searched for “Kirche”.

You can also join the site and pay and then you’ll not have to see all the annoying ad banners, but I’m not sure that makes sense for a learner for the occasional lookup.

But yeah, for that, or if you just want to “surf some idioms”, it’s great.
Here’s the link to the homepage.

Redensarten-index.de

That boring, bureaucratic looking box is the search function :).

Cool.
And now for the next one.

German Learning Games – Website

There are of course thousands of places online where you can find “language learning games” and most apps come with various “modes”.

But it’s rare that there’s a good variety of games with lots of vocabulary, a nice design, good functionality AND free access.

Well… one site that checks all these boxes is:

Learngermanwithgames.com

You can practice gender, conjugation, plural, time of day and more and add filters based on A1, A2 and also topics. The design is pleasing and consistent, the interface is intuitive and there are no ads. Oh and you can even use keyboard numbers for some of the multiple choice based games. You know… not a big deal, unless you want this feature. Then it’s a REAL game changer.

I guess some functions are behind a paywall, but I didn’t run into it while playing around.

The whole thing is definitely made with the help of AI, and I suspect there to be a little mistake here and there in the content, but the exercises are very simplistic and there’s not much for an AI to mess up.
The whole thing is sponsored by and probably made with a Canadian learning tool creator called Heuristica. Which was too complicated for me to understand with just a glance, so I didn’t pursue that for now, but maybe it’s a cool tool

I have DEFINITELY added it to my own bookmarks, where it can now fossilize, waiting for archaeologists in 2000 years to dig it up and be like :
“Wow, I have no idea what this is. ChatGPT, what is this?”
“This appears to be a bookmark for a website that someone bookmarked.”
“Wow, thanks. This is really helpful”
“No problem. I’m always here to help John—let me know if you need me to identify something else.”

Anyway, that’s it for today folks.
I hope you enjoyed this and find at least one of these sites useful.

Have an amazing day and I’ll see you all tomorrow.