Grammar Term
(click here to see term archive)

Spoken Past

English: Present Perfect (English), German: das Perfekt

Spoken Past is not an official grammar term, but it's the one I use on the site because one of its main features is that it's used in spoken German. The counterpart is "written past", which is officially called preterit.

Learn more

**Here are the posts in which I have talked about this concept in detail.**

German Past Tense - Preterit or Perfect

A fun overview over how the past tense works in German and where the differences are to English.

German Past Tense 2 - Spoken Past

All about the perfect in German, also called spoken past - when to use it, how to form the past participle, aka ge-form and when to use "sein" and "haben".

German Past Tense 3 - "The Written Past"

In this episode, we'll learn the rules for the regular preterit and go over the irregular forms of the most common verbs. With lots of examples.

Your thoughts and impressions

🗨

Subscribe

0 Comments

Inline Feedbacks

View all comments

Train Your Pronunciation

x

?

close info

What is this?

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.

How does it work?

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.

The recording is not working

The recording button should change color and pulsate while recording. If nothing happens, the most likely problem is that your browser is blocking the microphone. You can allow mic access by clicking on the icon left of the address in the address bar (on most browsers).

What do the colors mean

red: not very good (<20% match) yellow: okay (<50% match)

light green: good (<80% match)

green: amazing (80-99% match)

green+outline: perfect (100%)

Difficulty (only for AI exercises):