Yourdailygerman Advent Calendar
“Quite The Opposite“
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Hello everyone,
and welcome back to the epic Yourdailygerman Advent Calendar, today for the 6th of December. And that means in Germany it is Nikolaustag (St. Nicholas Day).
On Nikolaustag, the children wake up to little surprises stuffed into their shoes… yes, I am not kidding. As a kid, I would empty out my shoes from chocolate, oranges, nuts and fir branches and then put them on to walk to school.
But yeah, the tradition is that St. Nicholas (who is kind of like a more austere version of Santa Clause) comes by and drops a few small treats,
and so you’ll get a little treat too.
A new feature for the dictionary on this site… some of you might also call it… search function :).
So yeah… drumroll please…. ladies and gentlemen, I am happy to bring you
Opposites
Yes, that’s right.
From now on, my dictionary will start showing the opposite for a word.
Or I should say, it will show the opposite for a MEANING.
As you know, words often have more than one meaning, or idea, as I call them.
And these ideas might have very different opposites. first idea might have a totally different opposite than the second one.
Like for anziehen for instance..
- anziehen (to put on clothes) – ausziehen (to take off clothes)
- anziehen (to attract) – abstoßen (to repulse, to push away)
- anziehen (to fasten the handbrake) – lösen (to losen the handbrake)
And in my dictionary, you can now see the opposite for each idea individually ( if it has one, of course).
Here’s how it looks:
And of course, you can also click on it to get to the entry for that word.
Now, as of now, I am only using ONE opposite per idea. So sometimes, I have to pick one of several options and there might be other words that can also express the opposite. If you come across one, I’m happy to talk about it in the comments of the entry. ‘
And another thing I have to say… the system is pretty darn new. Vitor, one of the readers here who helped me with some of the coding, and I have only finished it like a couple of weeks ago and I haven’t had much time to actually enter many opposites yet.
So yeah… lot of the obvious ones will be missing.
But I’ll gradually add more and more till everything is covered.
And by the way… we’re working on a similar feature that shows you how common each idea is so you know if it’s something you should add to your vocabulary deck…. I mean… vocabulary.
Cool. So that’s the new feature and I’m really happy with it, so I hope you like it, too.
And I’m curious how you like the dictionary in general.
It’s been about a year since I put up the first “real” version of it and I have added a ton of stuff over the last year, both entries and functions.
But I also anonymously track the search attempts that fail to get an idea what people are looking for, and we recently crossed 10.000 failed searches, so I’m not sure how satisfied you actually are.
That’s why I have prepared a little questionnaire :).
So if you have a couple of more minutes, I’d be really happy to get some feedback.
And please be honest. If it sucks, it sucks, if it’s great, it’s great.
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Let me know in the comments if you have any additional feedback or ideas how I can improve it. Any input is welcome, really, so no worries about hurting my feelings. I can take whisky, so I’m oka… I mean, I can take criticism. That’s what I meant.
Anyway, have a great day, and I’ll see you tomorrow.