Hello everyone,
and welcome to German Midsommar Crazyness.
Have you seen this one horror movie from Ikea called Kallax? Where a deranged abomination stands next to people’s beds watching them sl… oh wait… that was the shelf. Sorry. The movie was called Midsommar and it’s some horror flick where a bunch of young people end up with a Swedish death cult sect for the Midsommar fest.
I have not seen that movie (though I did see the shelf, unfortunately).
But you know what… none of this matters, because today’s article has nothing to do with either of those. I just called it German Midsommar for clickbait. And instead of some cultural lore about Germany’s traditions you’re now stuck with…
Some YourDailyGerman Housekeeping
Oh god, so boring. Make it stop!!!!
The thing is, I do have to do some housekeeping on the code side of YourDailyGerman this week. Lots of small things that kind of piled up and most of them you won’t even notice, but there’s also a new feature I am adding that I’d love to get your feedback on.
And also, I have a few little questions that’ll help me make the site even better.
“I don’t know man, it does sound boring.”
I know, but please … I’ll make it brief.
And let’s start with the new feature.
New Feature – Examples 2.0
This has been something that’s kind of been in the back of my head for a long time, and someone suggested it a while ago, as well. And then, recently, someone else brought it up in the comments again and I decided to use the impulse this time and do it.
I’m talking about the option to select language for the examples in the articles.
Right now, both are visible, German and English.
- Das hier ist ein altes Beispiel.
- This is an old example.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
And the new idea is that you can select to only see one of them and try to figure out the other one in your head first before you check the solution.
Or you can blind out both versions and just go with the audio.
Pretty much like this (just click on the sentences to show or hide them):
- This is a new example, where the new function is already working.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
Here, German is blurred, but you can also decide to blur English, or blur both, or of course show both.
The main thing that I still have to do is adding the settings. Like, where you can preselect which configuration you’d like and where you can also switch quickly for all examples on one article.
But yeah… this is my new feature!
I know this is kind of a niche thing and a good portion of you is probably never going to use it, but I also think it doesn’t hurt to have it.
If you have feedback or ideas for it, please let me know in the comment!
But now, let’s get to the boring stuff.
Mid Sommar Poll
Besides actual content, I am working on a number of other things on the site, including reviewing and editing older articles, updating pdfs, adding quizzes, adding words to the dictionary and working on more AI stuff and so on.
I kind of want to do all of these things, but I do need to prioritize, so it’s really useful for me to every now and then check what you all are actually using, so I know where to focus more time.
So if you have a couple of minutes, that would be great!!
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About My Dictionary
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Other Features
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And then last but not least… you get to pick!
Vote your Verb!
One of my legit side projects is the prefix verb dictionary – basically a dictionary specifically for prefix verbs with a really cool new way of browsing through them. Right now, it’s a website, but we’ll make it an app eventually and in the meantime, I’m slowly adding more word families.
Last time, the vast majority of you voted that I add the family of “stehen” aufstehen, anstehen, verstehen and so on. That’s done, and I’m also almost done with the family of lesen.
So now it’s your turn again to choose the next one :).
In the future, I’ll do these types of polls over there, but we still have to setup the blogging portion so I’m doing this here for the time being.
Also, once a verb family is in the Prefix Verb Dictionary, you can also find it in the dictionary here. Just the navigation is much better over there.
Anyway, so yeah… pick the next family now.
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And that’s it for today :).
Thanks a lot for taking the time, this is really really helpful. Like… I do like having multiple things to work on at the same time, but I sometimes get lost and don’t know where I should focus. So yeah, danke für euern Input!
Oh and please let me know what you think about the upcoming feature where you can switch languages for all the examples.
And if you have any ideas or suggestions in general or some topics you have in mind… today is the perfect time :)
Have a great week and I’ll see you next time.
Oh… and in case you want to get the YourDailyGerman dictionary as a Chrome extension (ONLY works on Chrome), you can find that here:
YourDailyGerman – Dictionary Chrome Extension
When you’re logged in there, you can even favorite new words and add notes.
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ı lıked “blurred” system SO NICE..REALLY…CONGRATULATIONS EMMANUEL, REALLY thank you for your thoughts and efforts
Thanks :)
I REALLY LOVE your new blur feature. I’ve always had difficulty un-seeing translations next to an audio clip; whether in English or German. Now, I get to squeeze as much as I can out of the audio before going to the written German and still remain immersed in German before finally going to the English. Fantastic!
Awesome, happy to hear that!
This scholarship means so much to me! Thank you, Emanuel, and thank you to the sponsors.
Hi! I also am a new member. I am a university student, who is learning German to create a better future for herself. I wanted to thank everyone who paid extra to help people (like me) who can not get a subscription theirselves! I will not forgive this kindness and will always remember to give back to community in future, since this meant a lot to me. I hope you will all master German soon!
Hi! new member is here. I just wanted to drop a quick thank-you message for everyone here who paid extra so people who could not get a subscription could get sponsored. It means a lot to me.
Oh, and the switching languages feature sounds awesome. :>
Switching languages is an awesome idea! I’ll use that a lot. Sometimes I prefer the English first, sometimes the German. So to have the option of choosing is amazing. You look after us so well — thank you Emanuel!
Using Firefox on Android 8 here, the blurred example, top of page, doesn’t unblur fully, while the clear example blurs and unblurs just fine.
Yeah, I’ve already added the code for the general function and that messed with my example here.
Aloha from Hawaii, I couldn’t get the blurred German to show up though the voice helped!
I think it works now :)
I’m only really interacting with you via the emails you send, not going to your site through the font entrance. The AI tool was a link in one of your emails. That was very, very useful.
I just found the AI tools in the menu.. I didn’t even know it was there.. great! I like the idea of a ‘story generator’.. I will have to have a play. :) (Especially as an English language teacher- a real timesaver, although I have heard editing is required, to make sure the text ‘flows’ & is not awkwardly-expressed!)
Let me know how it holds up then :)
When I think of the summer solstice (Sommersonnenwendefeier), I think automatically of Sweden rather than of my native country. Perhaps growing up in the big city, we never celebrated midsummer, then again, Berliners are a fairly unconventional folk at best:-)
Is Sommersonnenwendefeier (quite the mouthful!) celebrated in other cities in Germany?
I’ve never experienced it anywhere outside Sweden! “Schoene Sommersonnenwendefeier! would sound as ridiculous in German as it would in Swedish, where a simple “Trevlig midsommar!” amply suffices:-)
Oh “trevlig”?? That’s cute… they say “trefflich” basically.
Love the idea
I do love the idea of the blur feature, but in your example when I click the blurred text, it just gets a bit less blurred and stays illegible/obscure. I’m using Safari at the moment.
EDIT: Actually, for some reason, that seems to only apply to this page. I was just on “Pflegen” and then “Schneiden” and it works great for both of those pages.
Tres cool!
Sorry the PDFs have had a slow phase, I decided to, uh, learn a little Hungarian.
Hahaha, don’t worry.
I still have a backlog myself with them.
And looking at the poll so far, not too many people seem to need them to be prettier, so this is a long term project for sure (for me, for you it’s “You decide whatever you want”-term :D).
Thanks for the bug report! I actually put the functions in place so it works sidewide yesterday, which then broke the one sample example in this post :)
I think I remember reading some articles that had yellow font in some parts, kind of like a work-around for the blur function. It worked! That stuff was really hard to read :)
Looks like the new feature will be fun to play with. Really for anything, but it would be fun to guess the meaning of some colloquial sayings. Or maybe something like the article on “schneiden”, where we can guess the meaning of some words, but the hints or answers are blurred out.
So the family relations in the dictionary, I guess there are two ways of getting to it, right? The section for “word family” at the bottom of the entry, and then the small link at the top of the entry where it says “based on.” (Like the entry for “auf einmal.”)
It seems like you get the same information either way, but I find myself looking at “word family” more. Probably because it’s bigger and saves you a click.
I imagine it’s a lot of work to make the lists of related words, but they’re nice to help practice the ol’ mind yoga. Or just as a way to explore the dictionary.
So the “based on” thing at the top is the direct parent.
The “word family” tab is the entire family (as far as I have entered it), including the common root and (for most roots) a short explanation of what it was and which English words belong to it.
I was recently thinking about taking away the “based on” option because I wasn’t sure who would ever click it, but at the same time, it might be interesting to quickly see that “Urlaub” is based on “erlauben”.
Entering words in the dictionary and then tagging them and relating them is one of the things I have put the most time in during the ‘rona and after.
I do it all by hand, and myself. But adding the family relations is more like “busy-work” so I do an hour here and there in between and now I think almost 8000 of 11500 entries are in some tree.
So yeah… I’m really happy if people use it. Though I feel like I have not yet used the full potential of the list. If you have any ideas how to make it more useful please let me know.
If it’s doable, it might be useful if the list shows which words are mentioned in an article.
Like on the entry for “akzeptieren,” you can see a pretty long list of related words. But I don’t know that there’s an article for, say, “überhaupt” or “ernsthaft” unless I click on them (or if I came across them before). If they were bolded or marked somehow, that would be a nice way to zero in on the articles.
I didn’t realize it when I answered the survey, but I guess I do use the dictionary to find articles. They’re fantastic for explaining the connections between words. The lists of related words help me remember what I read or find new connections.
Oh, wow, that would be quite an endeavor. It’s definitely possible, but I’m not sure how much extra database work that would create.
I’ll definitely add it to my list and look into it.
Are you using the “like”-feature of the dictionary at all?
All the time! It’s a pretty good way to track words and add notes.
The main thing is you can only see 50 words at a time on the “my-vocabulary” page. And you can’t filter to get a different 50. There was a time maybe 5-6 months ago when it showed everything, but it went away again.
The “add note” button is a little small (just a little), especially on mobile. Not a dealbreaker or anything. It’s pretty easy to type a quick note or drop in a sentence I found and hit save.
Oh, the archive… the forgotten child :)!!
I have some work to do with the dictionary examples, but after that, I’ll get to that archive page and make it a bit more usable!!
Love the term ‘mind yoga’! :) indeed, language learning is great mental exercise!
The blurring effect — a good feature.
The browser extension looks interesting, but I virtually never use my desktop. Too bad chrome for android doesn’t support extensions.
Hallo,
The link to the feature in this article isn’t a link and I may be really dense here, but I didn’t understand how to use the new feature…
You have no typos (at least none that I could find) :)
Bis bald!
Which link do you mean :)?
So in the future, there will be a selection somewhere – probably on top of each article or on the side – where you can choose how you want the examples to show… only German, only English, none or both. Whatever is not shown will be blurry and you can show it by just clicking or tapping on the text.
That gives you the option to hide the German version for instance and only listen to my audio and see if you can figure out the German by yourself.
But you can totally also show both languages and use the site like it was so far :)
Hope that clears it up!
Yep, thanks!!!
I’m really ignorant on all things web-based :)))))
Ich hatte das Gefühl, dass die Unschärfe-Funktion schon einmal vorgeschlagen worden war, und ich bin wirklich froh, dass du es nach meinem jüngsten Kommentar umsetzen wirst. Ich werde sie auf jeden Fall benutzen.
think I will be using the new blur feature for sure…
I feel like it was you who suggested it a long while ago, or am I mixing something up?
I should have done that way earlier, it feels so natural now that it’s there :)
It could indeed have been me at one point. I can’t exactly remember. I also feel i recently read someone else suggesting it. Either way i think it will be a great addition to the site : )
The new feature is good, 2 thumbs up.