Yourdaily__rman Advent Calendar
“Ge-Forming“
♥♥♥♥^♥♥
Hello everyone,
and welcome to day 16 of the Awesome Advent Calendar.
And after learning about Spiegel and synonyms, it is high time to do something a little more chill again.
Wait, did I say chill?
What I really meant was
chall
As in challenging.
Because we’ll do another little work out.
During fall, we did a few speaking exercises for forming sentences in past tense. And today, we’ll once again deal with the past tense, but this time we’ll focus specifically on:
the ge-form (aka past participle)
Because the ge-forms of many of the most common verbs are irregular, and those blah blah major challenge blah blah blah beginners blah blah blah.
So yeah, that’s what we’ll do today
As usual, we’ll do it by using speech recognition AI.
I’ll give you a German verb and you’ll have to find its ge-form. And to not make it too simplistic, you’ll have to answer as a stump sentence like so:
Ich bin gegangen.
So NOT JUST “gegangen”.
And don’t worry, I’ll tell you whether to use haben or sein, so you really only need to focus on the ge-form.
To start the recording just press the button and press it again to stop. The software will then compare your version to the proper answer, and if yours is good enough of a match you get a breakdown how well you did.
If it’s too hard, you can adjust the difficulty at any point in the quiz, so you can set it to anywhere between 100% match (which is almost impossible) and one percent match (which is pretty much anything).
If you click hint, you’ll see an indication whether the ge-form ends in the regular t or the irregular -en, so you just have to figure out the stem. And along with the hint, you’ll also see a play button where you can hear me say it.
Keep in mind, that the goal is that you practice these forms till they become automatic. So if you don’t nail it on the first try, just do the quizz again a few times over the course of a week, till you start getting bored. That’s usually a good sign that you know the material :).
Oh and for tech… the record button changes color when it is working. So if it doesn’t change color upon you clicking it, it’s probably because the browser is blocking my site access to your mic. Let me know in the comments if you need help with that.
Cool, so now we’re all set, and I’d say… viel Spaß :)
Let me know in the comments how you did and if you’d like more exercises with this format. These were some of the most important ones, but not all of them, so we could do more or even a bigger one.
Anyway, I hope you had a good time, have a great day, and I’ll see you tomorrow.


I absolutely love this exercise! Now how do you turn the accuracy up? You wrote that we can change the difficulty at any time, but I don’t see any control for this. I answered wrongly (Ich habe gezieht instead of gezogen) and still got 86% ..and I got 100% way too easily
Ohhhh, that slider got lost in code over the years :/.
I was iterating over different things to do with this pronunciation tool, but I have eventually settled on NOT using it in quizzes like this because it was very code intensive and quite messy. And then I kept changing the site more and more. The slider code is still somewhere but I honestly don’t know where and don’t have time at the moment.
What I can say is that the slider only changed what percentage you need to move forward though. It doesn’t influence the actual grading itself. If you got 86% for “gezieht”, then that’s the AI being not very good, and I have no influence on that.
This is excellent.
Thanks, I probably should do more of these but they’re a pain to set up.
Fun! Good review tool. And I’m here to report that you can get 100% on pronunciation, assuming you actually get the correct participle construction :-(, even with your evening cereal stuffed in your mouth. (Because hey, what’s better than evening cereal or Emmanuel’s German? Beides, natürlich.)
100% with cereal? That’s true native skill then :D
It seems I did really well, but not really as I used the hints most of the time as I’m very uncertain. I found the exercise useful and enjoyable. Thank you.
Just make sure to do it a few times over, until you know them by heart. It’s a practice tool more than an exercise :)
gewusst (wissen) was the hardest for me to pronounce. I had the detection meter turned up to 97, and finally got it there. This is wonderful technology, and is very very helpful. Voting for more!
Glad to hear you’re enjoying it :)
This was the first recording exercise I did. I worked better than I thought it would. Seems a bug on question 10: sitzen, I spoke the answer and the match was listed as 97% but it was marked as incorrect. I recorded again, this time with an 80% match to the answer and it was marked as correct. Also, in the hint there is a minor typo ;)
Both fixed, thanks :).
The correct/incorrect markings are more like an artifact, because I have modified a quizz software that wasn’t made for this AI stuff.
So the prompt depends on what I enter as a solution in the back end and I made a typo there.
What matters is the score that you get from the AI :). Glad you enjoyed it!
I just stuck at gesessen, never heard it before. Other than that I was 10/10
Well done :)!
Absolutely fantastic. Listening to your correct answers also helps me a lot. gegessen is hard to pronounce for me but all very helpful. Thank you!
4 missed with difficulty at 84%. Great quiz and it helped me identify some of my “problem” areas in my (not very good) pronunciation. Many thanks!
Glad you enjoyed it :)
Ich habe wieder keinen “Done” Knopf :(
Aber das Quiz hat mir sehr gefallen! :D
Meinst du um zu markieren, dass du den Artikel gelesen hast?
Ja das meinte ich :)
fixed
This was great!
Everything works great! Dankeschön;)
Perfect :)!
Hi Emanuel, the record button doesn’t change colour although I granted access to the microphone. The microphone icon also appears alongside the website address. I’m using an iPad
Hmm, does it blink after being pressed?
Yes.
Then it should be recording, actually. Do you get feedback from the site once you click “stop”?
This one went really well for me, although it didn’t really approve of my gegessen no matter how many times I tried it.
“During the fall we did a few speaking exercises for forming sentences in the past tense.”
Adding the definite articles makes it flow more naturally to this American’s ears. If I were really to wordsmith it, I’d probably put the main idea earlier, and the temporal clause at the end: “We already did a few past-tense speaking exercises in the fall, and today …” It seems that English clause position is based more on the nuance of what you want to emphasize, but in German the order is more strict: temporal qualifiers always come first. Is that right, or is this just another case of other language teachers fall back on giving you rules rather than trying to develop sprachgefühl the way you do?
“temporal qualifiers always come first. ”
Absolutely not :).
I think it’s more because temporal information is usually not that important, and I tend to phrase stuff the German way, with the main payload coming later.
Have you read my series on word order, by any chance? I go into depth on that there.
Actually I remember being taught that the convention is to put the most important part at the end in English, too, despite what sounds “natural” to me. And, yes, I remember (imperfectly!) your series on word order. But a certain owl-ish site that shall not be named seems to impose unnecessary restrictions on phrase orders. Sounds like that’s another case of bad advice coming from other sites.
Es gibt nichts Besseres am Morgen als Kaffee und diese Artikel zusammen. Vielen herzlichen Dank! Außerdem ich freue mich auf dein neues Video mit EasyGerman. Darfst du uns sagen, wann es hochgeladen wird?
Naja… Elon ist grad Person of the Year geworden… die Woche wäre ein guter Zeitpunkt ;).
I have another totally off topic question, but I have been wondering about this for quite a while. In American grade school, we learned a phrase for spelling 2 vowel words: “The first one does the talking, the second one does the walking” (though exceptions abound!). In German it is the opposite, and more consistent. Have you any theories as to why the switch?
Haha, nice little rhyme. I can’t recall there being anything like that in German. But the only instance where you really ignore one is “ie”. All the others get some pronunciation effort.
For the very first time I was able to do the speaking exercise. Usually I use my laptop, and I have never been able to get it to work properly. So today I am using my tablet and it works perfectly! Das gefaeilt mir sehr!
Ich dance dir darfur.
Ich habe den Eindruck, dass wir unsere künftigen Roboter-Oberherren durch Spracherkennung trainieren ;). Ein Scherz. Die Sprachübungen gefallen mir, sogar wenn es “ich bin gesessen” heißt :D.
Let’s get this article getypoed:
workout is a single word (when meant as exercise)
“Let me know in the comment if you need help” (Let me know in the comments if you need help)
My mic on PC is not working, I’ll have to this this later on iPad…
Bis morgen!
Oh, forgot to say, your comment yesterday to one of our friends on the blog, and I quote “70% of learners even at B2 do not know the entire basic vocabulary native speakers use daily. It’s rather large in German” put a huge smile on my face. Vocab is my Achilles heel and knowing it actually IS a problem wif’ (I know you like this one) the German language rather than ME was a big relief…
I mean, I can easily crank out a sentence like “Vielleich hätte ich das Vocab ein bisschen mehr üben sollen” without much difficulty only to find myself struggling for words when I try to explain a film or a book in German (it’s an endless string of sagen, machen, kommen, gehen…)
A friend of mine who was pretty much fluent did a summer intensive course once and I convinced him to skip B2 and go straight to C1, because I thought he’s good enough. He had studied Latin AND Ancient Greek in school, so he knows how to deal with grammar. But he still struggled with … the vocabulary.
It seemed to him there’s just no end to new words. It’s absolutely not just you, it’s everyone!
You need to read, there’s no other way, imo. Or listen to a LOT of pods.
Try writing one comment in German, this calendar season. Just to get used to the slowness :)
Recorder not working for mich. Said each outloud to myself, double checked each on my Conju DE-app and got 100%.
Did‘t use the hints – wanted a challenge.
Should have had to guess haben/sein just to make it more interesting.
Oj – forget to say:
True Confessions: did simple past and pp. On the last one, I was like: bringen, brang, gebracht and felt like someone jabbed my left ear wif‘ a dessert fork – BRANG? Hallo! BRACHTE – gebracht.
Checked it on Conju DE and was happy my internal warning system kicked in – almost got that simple past wrong.
“bringen brang gebracht”… that does have a good flow :)!
Does the recorder button change color, or blink in any way? Do you get an error message?
Oh and was the recording working in the other Advent Calendar exercises this year?
Nope