hinterfragen

(hinter (insep))

Word type: hinter (insep)
Based on: fragen (nach)

Perfect (spoken past): hat hinterfragt

Preterite (written past): hinterfragte

Meanings

1.

question, second-guessing, doing "one's own research"

(it's about not believing everything you're told. Originally, it was a good thing, but during the Covid pandemic in 2020, the verb got hijacked by "the skeptical ones")

How useful:

My Articles

Advent Calendar 2020 - "My Unwort"

Word Family

Root: *prek-

The core idea of this root was:

asking, pleading

The German fragen is on the more neutral side, as are the Slavic children of this root which are also about asking. The English to pray shifted toward a very “intense” and specific pleading.
German forschen (to do research) is more proactive, but at the core of it is also a question.

The Latin branch shifted a bit toward the idea of depending on the will of someone else. In English, this then shifted toward uncertain, risky, dangerous That’s where precarious and deprecate are from.

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With the pronunciation tool, you can check how well you pronounce a word or sentence. It uses an AI system that is being developed by EF languages for that purpose. The AI takes your input, and compares it to how a native speaker would sound. Then, it gives you feedback for each word and the sentence as a whole.

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You put in a word or sentence or load and example from the site. Then you hit record to start and again to stop. You'll then get feedback on how you did, for each individual word and in total. The AI grades sound, emphasis and rhythm. The recording is limited to 20 seconds and will stop automatically.

How do I know what to improve if I got a low score

That's beyond what an automatic system like this can do. It's not a tool to perfect your pronunciation. It's more about giving you a rough estimate and giving you the option to actually speak. But to really iron out mistakes, you need feedback from a native speaker.

My results vary a lot

Quite a bit depends on the quality of your microphone. If there's a lot of noise around you, the AI will struggle with that. Also, the AI does better with sentences. For short words, it's not as good. Lastly, the AI is still being developed and struggles with some important words.

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