German Advent Calendar – Day 7

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…

English has a very beautiful side to it that it doesn’t really show often enough in daily life. German does too, but German feels a bit long winded even if it’s short.
But English has this whole second life next to the normal, quick, snappy, business-y way of talking that’s somehow really beautiful to me.

Especially this verse style where the last and first line rhyme… really touching a chord for me.

So yeah, thank you all who participated. I’m really impressed.
If you want to check out what I mean, just check the comments on the post for Day 6. It’s worth it.

Now, next up, someone asked me in the comments for the post about “zue Tür” (closed door) or “apper Arm” (“ab”– arm that has come off), if I was trolling because their German partner didn’t really know these phrasings.

So I asked about it in the German learning subreddit to get a feel for what the community says. In a nutshell, it’s defintely more “universal” in the North, so they do use an, ab, auf and so on as adjectives.
I also learned that at least zu also exists in the South but they actually say “zuene Tür” instead of “zue Tür”. So theirs more complicated actually.

And then, someone also mentioned that at least the use of “zu” as adjective was already described by the Grimm brothers in their crazy dictionary. So it’s not a recent thing.

If you want to check out the thread on Reddit, you can find it here:

“zue, anner, aufes” – What Reddit Says

Cool.

But now for the main thing and the little present for today.

New Feature – Search Suggestions

This summer, I added a new type of search that makes it easier to find articles based for specific topics.
Which did work great as long as … you spelled everything perfectly. If you have a typo, you’d get “no results” quite often.

These days are over now because I have bought a premium add-on that gives you:

“did you mean” suggestions.

So now, when you write abgebn, it’ll offer you abgeben with a link.

This has been online for a day only, so I really don’t know how good it does with longer phrases, but it’s definitely an upgrade from before where you just plain got nothing.

And also, a few weeks ago, I decided to make the dictionary search available for all on desktop too. So now you basically see TWO search fields. One is for the site and it’s what you should use if you search a topic, like German cases or something like that.
And the other one is for my dictionary, which does better for word searches but worse for topics.

Please do let me know if you have questions about any of this :).

I’ll probably add a third way to explore YourDailyGerman next year, using AI assisted chat or something like that.
Don’t worry, I’ll be VERY careful to make the AI just a helpful tool to navigate my site and work with the content but NOT do any actual explaining. It’s just going to be a convenient way to interface with my content.

But yeah, that’ll be for next year. For now, I’m happy to have these new “Did you mean”-suggestions and I really do hope they work at least passably well.

Let me know if they do or if they glitch badly. No need to test them right now, just if you have an experience with them, please share.

That’s it for today, habt einen schönen Rest-Adventstag und wir sehen uns morgen mit … sag ich nicht :)