Hi everyone,
I hope you’re having a great week so far and that your German is coming along nicely.
I’m doing pretty good because I am in Oulu. That’s a town in Finland about 100 miles South of the arctic circle on the northern end of the Baltic sea and I came here because I absolutely needed some actual winter. Like… with snow and really cold temperatures. I love that. I really love seasons, actually and I want them to be extreme. -20 degrees Celsius in winter, +40 in summer. That’s my ideal :).
Unfortunately, it is not as cold as I had hoped but it’s still great, because Oulu is a beautiful city with lots of nature and water, Finns are really great people and there’s like the perfect gym with a view of the sea really close to my home.
Oh and actually, it’s the city where I realized that I’m actually good with languages (I used to think that it’s not my thing), and learning Finnish also helped a great deal to get an open mind for how different things can actually be.
So yeah… I’m really happy to be here.
But of course I also came to get some really focused work done, and I’ll have a real article ready in a few days, but I wanted to share a small site update real quick.
Because I have a really cool new feature for my dictionary.
Search Suggestions
So far, if you typed something in that wasn’t directly in my dictionary, you’d get no results, but from now on, the dictionary will actually make suggestions for what you might have meant. That should save you some hassle with typos and endings and so on.
I still have to “beauty up” the page itself and I also want to add either a comment section or a form where you can make suggestions what I should add to the dictionary.
But I decided to make the feature already accessible. Here’s how it looks for the search term “falln”:
Now, this is very much a work in progress, so for some search terms you might get a few suggestions, but not the one you’re actually looking for, even though it is in the dictionary.
But I’ll improve the suggestions over time, and they’re already an improvement as they are.
Oh and also, the dictionary used to also allow searches in English, but for some reason that is not working at the moment. I’ll have to investigate that but I hope to bring that back soon.
EDIT: It’s back :)
Cool.
So that’s the new feature, now for the question.
One important question
Well, I don’t know if it’s actually important but a little clickbait is okay :).
So, I was thinking of playing around with a language learning app recently (for Finnish) and there, the translations of the examples were hidden. I kind of really liked that, so I am now wondering if I should do the same.
Right now, you see the German and English versions of an example right above one another, and my idea is to hide the English side and you have to click to see it.
- So ist es jetzt.
- This is how it is now.
- So könnte es sein.
- (click to view)… NOT WORKING, just an idea
Now, that of course means that you’ll have to do a lot of clicking if you want to see the English, and that’s why I wanted to ask all of you what you think, before making a change like that.
So here’s the poll:
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Thanks a lot!
Oh and another thing. A couple of months back, I don’t recall when exactly, someone complained about the position of the audio button for the examples. I can’t find that comment or email anymore, but it was an interesting idea, so if you’re reading this, please please speak up in the comments and let me know again what we talked about. I do want to “streamline” the layout of the examples a little bit so any ideas are appreciated.
So yeah… let me know in the comments how you like the search suggestions and if they’re working well so far. And let me know your thoughts about the examples and how to show them.
Have a great few days and I’ll see you soon.
wpDiscuz
