What’s up everyone,
how are you all doing? Are you feeling fit and awake?
Kinda sorta?
Well, that’ll have today, because today it’s time for a nice proper exercise about
German Past Tense
There are a few exercises about this on the site already, but this one is next level, because this one involves … speaking.
By YOU :).
Those of you who were following me through the summer might remember that the company EF -Languages offered me to use their AI speech recognition system and I actually put my hacker-hat on and integrated it into my site and the quiz system I’m using.
We already did a test of that in summer, and I’ve worked out a few kinks since then. I’m still working on it and adding features but I think it’s definitely ready for use.
So… in today’s exercise we’ll practice the German spoken past tense and you will HAVE to actually say the answer to pass.
Here’s how it works :
I’ll give you a fairly simple German sentence in present tense along with its English present tense translation and your task is to put it into past tense.
Here’s an example for what you get…
“Ich gucke mit Maria Netflix.”
(I’m watching Netflix with Maria)
And here’s what you’ll have to do:
“Ich habe mit Maria Netflix geguckt.”
The crucial point is: you have to SPEAK your answer :).
Actually, let’s do a quick test and see if it works.
Just hit the record button to start recording. Don’t hold it like you’d do on WhatsApp, just tap it. And then hit it again to stop (It’ll auto-stop after 20 seconds).
Read out this:
“eins zwei drei”
The button should change color when the recording is active, so if it doesn’t change the color, something isn’t working. If have set up some error messages, but not enough to catch everything.
If it doesn’t work, you’ll most likely have to allow my site to use the microphone of your device. Let me know in the comments, if you need help with that, but please add the device you’re using and the browser.
I’ll add a typing option in the future, but for now, if you don’t want to speak or you can’t, then you can skip this exercise.
Oh but there’s one really cool new feature, also. I have added the option for you to set the “difficulty”. So you can change for yourself how well a match you have to be to pass. It is set to 60% initially, but you can change that at any time. So if you want a REALLY strict AI, you can tune it up to 99% and if you just want to get a pass, no matter what you say, you can set it to 0.
So… not being good enough is not an excuse, because now YOU define what good enough is :)
Cool.
What will we pratice?
I already said that we’ll do past tense, but that’s a huge topic and we’ll focus on one aspect at a time. Today, we’ll only do spoken past and we’ll only use verbs that build it with haben. So essentially, you’ll have to pick the right form of haben and the right ge-form.
If you’re now like “Ge-form? Spoken Past? Using haben?… uh… what?!” or if you want to recap the material before doing the exercise, then you’ll find all you need in this article:
German Past Tense – The Spoken Past
But especially if you’re a beginner, you will most likely NOT get all the ge-forms correct on the first go.
The idea is that you do the exercise several times over the course of a couple of weeks, until you can really say the solutions somewhat fluently and without mistakes.
The goal is not to get 100% on the pronunciation… the goal is to get used to the forms and the flow.
Cool. So I think we’re pretty much ready to go, so I’ll just say… viel Spaß und viel Erfolg :)
Oh and let me know how you did and all your feedback in the comments.
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And, how did you do?
Let me know how you liked it and if you have any suggestions about how to improve it.
Any feedback is welcome, even if you just need to vent some frustration because the mic wasn’t working properly :).
Oh and of course if you have a question about the examples themselves, let me know in the comments as well and I’ll clear it up.
Hope you had fun and remember to do it again a few times, if you’re still learning this stuff.
Have a great week and I’ll see you next time.
Super
Yippee! Got a new computer and it works well well well with this exercise now (unlike last time). I am so pleased, and this is an excellent Uebung! (Ich habe keinen Umlaut…). Thank you thank you for this, I love it! And yes, I do need the practice, especially with the umlauted vowel words.
I love how you are always adding to and improving your site. You do great work.
Sweet, great to hear it works and that you enjoy it :)
Hi Emanuel,
Mit dieser Übung kriege ich nur NaN%!? Was ist los? Ich denke wohl sie ist eine gute Übung aber ich kann sie nicht. Hilfe bitte.
M
Ändert der Record-Button seine Farbe, wenn du drückst?
Das ist wichtig.
Und welchen Browser benutzt du denn?
Ja genau. Die Farbe des Record-Buttons ändert wenn ich drücken. Manchmal ist es OK aber dann nicht. Ich benutze Apple mit IOS.
Normalerweise habe ich kein problem mit meinem Browser und deine Übungen.
Hast du das Mikrofon eventuell irgendwo stumm geschaltet?
Dann stimmt irgendwas mit deinem Mikrofon nicht. Der Browser erkennt es, aber es nimmt nix auf, so wie es aussieht.
This was good! Really liked it.
About the microphone use, I am on Chrome on a Windows computer, and what seems weird to me is that as soon as I load the page, and as long as I stay in the page (so, before starting the quiz even) the microphone is reported as in-use.
I would prefer for it to be activated when I start the quiz
(I’m a developer, and therefore maybe a little picky? Great stuff regardless!!!)
So I’m asking the browser for a stream once the page has fully loaded. If a stream is possible, I then have a bunch of javascript that preps the page itself (adding functions to buttons etc).
I guess I could move all that behind the “start quizz” button, but then I wouldn’t be able to just drop in recording entities in mid text (which is what I’ll do with older posts).
Having the whole thing start after clicking “record” would mean a branch for every single button.
It’s definitely possible, no doubt, and I’ll add it to my coding to do list, but it’ll take a while :). Thanks for the feedback though!!
Hey Emanuel thank you for that membership.Guys he will help you to get that membership free if you really cant pay. Thank you again Emanuel and the other sponsors
I like these! It’s funny that I get 95% and it still gets marked incorrect
That’s a bug :). Did it happen for all of them or just one??
Oh, I love that, the way all the words come up in different colours, so I can see if I’m improving with multiple tries – and often I’m getting worse, not better. Confusing, but bodes well for real life when you only say something once. Hopefully.
It’s definitely a sign that your most “natural” way is the best and when you try to optimize it, you opti-mess it actually :)
I enjoyed the excercises. It’s good to know that what I say is being recognized correctly :) I noticed that sometimes the words I spoke didn’t have the bold outline on the word, or sometimes (mostly the ich in the beginning of the sentence) was highlighted red or yellow. Is there a legend that I’m missing out on, that explains what these graphics mean?
There’s no legend yet, but I’ll add one.
The colors represent how well you did on the individual words.
“red” : 20% accuracy or less… not good enough
“yellow”: meh, probably understandable but definitely needs work
“green”: good
“green+outline”: perfect (95% match or above)
I forgot the exact percentages, actually. I have set them to some values but I can change that, so the border between yellow and green is totally arbitrary. It’s just to give you an idea what to focus on.
If you consistently have issues with the first word, maybe you start speaking a bit too quick for the device.
Thank You , I am truly appreciate it !!!
Compared to some of the other quizzes on here, this was pretty easy. I smashed it. I had a little chuckle when I achieved 100% and it said “This is close enough”
haha, yeah, I haven’t had time to do taylor made messages for different scores. I’ll slowly improve it over time.
And yes, this one is definitely meant to complete the “beginners” course, so it’s on the easier side for sure.
Super toll Quiz. Funkioniert wie ein Traum. Bravo.
Danke :).
Kleine Korrektur: “super tolles Quizz”.
Remember to at least add an “e” for the rhythm.
Ich habe gelernt, dass ich nicht “Handy” sagen kann! Im Ernst, es würde sehr hilfreich, wenn das Programm von einem Muttersprachler den Satz wiederholen könnte.
Ich bin ein Dummer. Ich habe gerade gelesen, dass die ausgesprochene Antwort unter den Hint befinden werden kann. Vielen Dank für die angenehme Übung. <—— ein anderes schlechtes Wort für mich auszusprechen
“befinden werden kann”… uh, nope :).
– “gefunden werden kann”
Just click on “hint”, you can hear me say it there :)
Das liebe ich! Es war sehr hilfreich! It takes off points for pronunciation? I would love to have more of these exercises.
Vielen Dank!!
Es war viel spaß. DANKE SEHR !
My voice is not being recorded
Does the button change color when you click it?
Maybe it’s just my phone but on Q1 it marked my answer but then didn’t move on to the next question. It won’t actually record that I’ve answered the question.
I’m using Ecosia on a Moto G6 Play
And now on Q3 I got 100% but it marked me as incorrect
Okay, that’s a bug then. Try to ignore the correct/incorrect markings. They literally have NOTHING to do with what you say.
Focus on the speaking and the grading you get. That’s all that matters.
By the way… as far as I know, Ecosia is a search engine, not an actual browser. So you’re using Ecosia inside some other browser.
It marked me as incorrect on some and not at all on others. It seemed to be that if there was an individual word that wasn’t marked green, then I would get an “incorrect” score, but if all words were green then I would get no mark and it wouldn’t give me the button to move on to the next question.
Ecosia is a browser as well as a search engine. The logo is a little green and blue planet. I do also have chrome and Firefox installed on my phone…
…
Between typing these out I tried it on Chrome and it worked perfectly so maybe that is the problem then.
You can continue by pressing the circled 2 and so on after completing each exercise.
Yeah, if the next-button doesn’t show, that’s kind of a backup :)
Thank you so much !
My self esteem grew a little bit.
That’s AWESOME!!
Do the exercise a few times until you can quickly ramble through it.
That should have some carry over to actual conevrsations.
This worked really well for me and was incredibly useful. Similar exercises mixing up haben and sein past tenses would be nice – that’s what I really struggle with!
I’ll definitely do this. Next, we’ll do a round for verbs with just “sein”, and then we’ll mix them.
And then the ones that use the real past.
I said pronunciation is an issue (not an outsider.)
I like the exercise! I don’t have the opportunity to speak German, so pronunciation is an outsider for me. I found puzzling that all my repetitions received very inconsistent grades. My natives languages is Spanish. Thanks!
Do you mean in terms of colors or in terms of total score?
For the colors, if your version hover right around the threshhold between “green” and “yellow” for example, you’ll see fluctuations. But the total score shouldn’t vary that much. Try re-recording one of your recordings… the grade should be similar if you have good speakers.
You do a recording, then press record again and just play your recording.
Let me know if you know what I mean and what the result of that was. I’m curious :).