Feedback on Your Writing – New Tool
Hello everyone,
And welcome to a new episode of My New Tool.
Yes, another one!
And My New Tool of course means YOUR new tool, because mi toola e su toola.
Oh man, I think I had too much coffee today.
But anyway, get ready for.. drumroll…
Writing Correction Tool – 2.0
Now, those of you who have been members of YourDailyGerman for a while might already know the Sentence Correction tool.
You’d give it a sentence you wrote and it would correct it and give you feedback on it.
This was actually one of the first tools I ever made 3 years ago, when I started experimenting how to use AI meaningfully for German learning.
And 3 years in our new AI world means of course 80 years. The tool was like a rundown shed in the woods with no plumbing or electricity.
So I recently gave it a proper do-over and now, it’s a really cute little cozy mountain hut, that’s also super functional and techy :).
What the text correction tool does
You enter a piece of your writing. Like a journal entry or a thing you had to write for German class or something. It can be somewhat longer, so it’s not limited to a sentence anymore as before, but it does have a limit of course.
It takes around 700 words, give or take, so enough for a typical practice text.
So yeah, you enter the text, and the tool will then evaluate it and give it back with all the mistakes numbered and marked with different colors depending on what kind of mistake (gender and endings, word order, word choice, tenses).
Click on the mark, and you’ll see what the mistake is and how the correct version should be.
You can also find a list version of all the mistakes below but that’s not all.
If you have a good number of errors the tool will ALSO try to group them and give you condensed feedback. If you have three mistakes where you forget to put the verb at the end, the tool will (or should) tell you that this is one area to focus on.
And then, last but not least, it gives you the corrected version of your text, though I’m not sure if that’s really that useful.
Now, this is arguably the tool I have tested the least thoroughly, mainly because I can’t really come up with a variety of wrong texts. It did do fairly well and reliably with my test, but I’m super duper curious how it works for you, so please do let me know.
And also, do let me know if you have any ideas on how to improve this and make it even more useful. You’ve already had some great ideas for other tools, so I’m sure you’ll have some great little tweaks for this one as well.
Now, the tool is already up in the practice section as Sentence Correction Tool , so you can already find it there. But I’ll also put it below, so you can try it out right here :).
So… viel Spaß!
German Text Correction – The Tool
One quick piece of info for non-members- you can also use the tool, but you’re limited to two correction runs per day. I might increase that and instead have some extra functions but for the members only, but I think it’s already quite a fair deal.
Take advantage of it, but don’t take advantage of me trying to keep it open.
Anyway, let’s go!
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Let me know how you liked it! What works well, what doesn’t, what would you like me to add. The one thing I think makes sense is a sort of writing prompt where the tool gives you a topic or question that you need to write about.
But yeah… your ideas are very much welcome.
Thanks in advance, I hope you enjoy the tool, have a great week and I’ll see you next time.
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Entscheidung. That was a sentence I was intending to check with the writing tool !
You’re talking to the comment section, not the tool.
Yes I’m on an iMac running Ventura 13.7 and the Firefox 152.0.5 browser. The text that begins ‘Let me know how you like it!…’ is displayed directly on top of the ‘All mistakes’ drop down box, and also partially obscures the ‘Corrected version’ box.
I tried with my firefox browser (Windows) and everything looks fine. This is likely a css issue but if I can’t recreate it I can’t really fix it. Do you know how to access developper tools of the browser by any chance?
((If this question makes you go “What?” then the answer is no :))
Keine Ahnung. But thanks in any case, and I’ll try a different browser.
Let me know if the issue persists there, and sorry for the hassle.
Things work great on Safari. I’ve had similar issues with Firefox on other sites so I think it’s more of a ‘operator error’ issue than anything on your end. Perhaps I have a setting toggled wrongly on FF.
In any case this tool for me is or could be a very useful and I can see using regularly.
The biggest issue I have at the moment is in crafting sentences to ‘produce’ spoken German (I’m at the cusp of B1 Niveau so this is becoming ever more important). However I tend to work ‘visually’. This means writing something down and seeing it concretely before or as I speak is a form of self correction. Unfortunately up to now often I have typically used DeepL when writing but that has become a bit of an AI crutch. I want to move away from it for daily communication; it doesn’t provide constructive feedback that I lack, it just provides the ‘right’ answer (that is, translation).
Again, thanks for your efforts.
Oh, good to hear it’s not just my site that shows up weird. Firefox is definitely a bit of a “problem child” browser when it comes to layout.
I think they’re more strict about how they interpret certain design specifications, while Chromium is very lax, but lax works and strict doesn’t sometimes :)
Writing is among the best things you can do to get better!
And you don’t even have to get the corrections right away. I would recommend, you write something, let it sit for a day, read it again and you’ll find a few mistakes yourself. And THEN you put it into a correction tool.
It’s really surprising how many mistakes you can catch yourself if you have a little distance to the moment you wrote it.
Good tip, cheers!
The text soliciting feedback seems to obscure the text outlining the errors in the submitted text.
I don’t understand what you mean, to be honest.
Do you mean two layers are atop each other?
What device are you seeing this on, desktop or mobile?
I really enjoyed this. I feel I learn best when I give it my best effort, then see my mistakes and have them explained to me. I hope I can be diligent enough to do this daily- or at least 5 times/week. Thanks for your work on this.
Wow! Die App ist noch besser! Vielen Dank :)
Kleine Frage:
Ich bin Immobilienmaklerin und habe das Wort “Showing” in meinem Übungs Satz benutzt, welches die App zu „Besichtigung“ korrigiert hat. Würde „Besichtigung“ bei Immobilien verwendet werden für den Fall, in dem ein Klient das Innere eines Hauses sieht, das zum Verkauf steht?
Ich bin nicht in der Szene und “moderne” Makler sagen vielleicht Showing, aber der Standard ist schon Besichtigung.
Zum Beispiel koennte auf einer Webseite bei einem Objekt stehen:
– Besichtigung jederzeit moeglich.
Danke :)
I like it. It picked up my errors, explained what was wrong, and even gave me a translation so I could check that I had said what I thought I had said!
Freut mich, dass dir das Tool gefaellt :)!
Than you for this.
It’s working well
Has good and bad sides. It does give you great explanations for you errors, easily–to get the same thing from standard AI is much more work. However, in the end it does not help you phrase things naturally. When you use something like DeepLs translator, or AI, it rephrases your clumsy German into much more natural German. This, however, only corrects the errors but leaves your unnatural, clumsy phrasing in place, as long as the grammar and spelling are correct. So it’s best to use it in conjunction with regular AI (e.g. Gemini) rather than instead of it.
Thanks for all you do for us, Emanuel! What a great resource.
Very good tool. I have tryed it once and it works perfectly. The mistakes are listed and a proper recommendation is made for each case.
Happy it works well :)
Lieber Herr Emmanuel,
vielen herzlichen Dank für Ihre Freundlichkeit und Großzügigkeit. Ich freue mich sehr über die Möglichkeit, mit Ihren Materialien kostenlos Deutsch zu lernen.
Mein besonderer Dank gilt auch allen Menschen, die diese Gemeinschaft unterstützen und es ermöglichen, dass Menschen wie ich kostenlos Deutsch lernen können. Ihre Hilfe und Ihr Engagement bedeuten sehr viel und eröffnen vielen Lernenden neue Chancen.
Vielen Dank für Ihre Unterstützung. Ich weiß das wirklich zu schätzen.
Mit freundlichen Grüßen
Remmy
Willkommen Remmy und Hut ab für dein Deutsch!
This is very useful and helpful, great.
Thank you sponsors and members for pitching in extra money so that everyone can access these resources!! Excited to learn and use these tools :) Vielen Dank
I wanted to test this with what I expected to be some impeccable German text from Deutsche Welle:
“Auch Angehörigen können diese Träume helfen.”
The tool responded with an error:
Gender & Endings Angehörigen→Angehörige
Nach ‘auch’ steht hier das Subjekt im Nominativ Plural. Die richtige Form ist ‘Angehörige’, nicht der Dativ Plural ‘Angehörigen’.
This seems rather strange to me. It seems confused about what part of speech Angehörigen is.
If I change the word order to:
Diese Träume können auch Angehörigen helfen.
then the tool is happy with Angehörigen.
Interesting test!
I tried it out twice myself and it seems to be consistently getting this wrong, even if I add other, REAL mistakes.
The fact that Angehoerigen is correct only becomes apparent once you have the full sentence and “feel” that Traeume is the actual subject.
The way AI does the corrections is that it goes through the text in a linear fashion and the word “koennen” SEEMS to confirm subject for Angehoerige, so its attention drops, I guess.
I’ll think about ways to work around stuff like this, but it’s tricky because with every extra step, there’s also extra chances for a glitch. But yeah… this would be something that it ideally should get right.
Adjectival nouns are a challenge for sure!
I like it so far , thanks quite a help for me.
I’m very excited about this. I’d say my reading and listening comprehension is B2, but speaking and writing is A1. Any kind of writing practice is welcome. One day I’ll be brave enough to speak with someone .
I’ll give you my sentence. (I work in the medical field and I’ll direct patients back to the waiting room if we don’t have exam rooms)
Leider habe ich jetzt keine Zimmer. Bitte warten Sie ein paar Minuten im Wartezimmer auf. Wir werden Sie kürzlich rufen.
4 corrections – I understand half of them.
1. It states “Zimmer should be singular”. Corrected to kein Zimmer.
I am referring to more than one room though… So I’m not sure what is right or wrong.
2. Auf not needed for warten without an object. Understood!
3. In Kürze instead of kürzlich. Got it.maye there is a better word to use in general in this situation.
4. Mentioned putting “rufen” at the end of the sentence for the last sentence. But rufen is at the end.
I’m sure how I phrased things are quite clumsy, but… I tried
I know the correction tool isn’t going to be perfect. I do like seeing the corrected version at the end btw. It’s also very nice having the errors explained. It saves me a bunch of time researching the whys and hows?
1. Your intuition is correct, plural makes sense too. Classical instance of the AI overcorrecting.
3. In a context like this, native speakers would say “dann” or “bald” or “sobald eins (ein Zimmer) frei ist”. “In Kürze” is generic and means shortly, but it’s not ideal for this context. “kürzlich” means “recently”, so that indeed makes no sense.
4. Yes, AI was being AI here.
Your sentence was GOOD. Definitely B1 or higher, not A1 :). There were only 2 real mistakes, and the Ai was eager to find more. I’ll see if I can refine how I prompt for mistakes and maybe filter them down a bit so these pseudo mistakes never reach the user.
Sorry, silly query, but why “AUFwarten” in the above sentence? “Aufwarten” means “to attend to someone”, whereas “warten” is the only valid response in this instance.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding your question/comment, but are you saying “aufwarten” ist wrong and “warten” ist correct? but I used “aufwarten” (incorrectly), and I was corrected to use “warten”.
So the AI assumed you wanted to use “warten auf” but then forgot to add the actual object.
Harald understood it as you using the verb “aufwarten”, which means something completely different.
Yep, that’s it exactly!
Es tut mir Leid, allerseits, ich wollte keine Drachensaat ernten
And my mistake for forgetting the words “aufwarten” v.s. “warten auf” thank you both for helping me figure all that out.
Die Krankenschwester wartet auf die Patientin auf. = The nurse is attending to her patient
Ich warte auf den Arzt, bloss er hat bis Vormittag Sprechzimmer. = I’m waiting for the doctor, only he’s in surgery until 11:00.
Die Krankenschwester wartet auf die Patientin auf. = The nurse is attending to her patient
This is not a proper sentence for me. “aufwarten” doesn’t mean to attend in my mind.
Ich warte auf den Arzt, bloss er hat bis Vormittag Sprechzimmer.
Same here, what does Sprechzimmer mean in this context?
My understanding is “surgery” aka “to have consultation hours”.
Oh, a thousand pardons!! I must have been sleeping at the switch:
Sprechzimmer ought to have been Sprechstunde.
Habe es gerade erst ausprobiert, es hat sehr gut geklappt! Es ist mir sehr peinlich, wie viele „dass“ und „das“ ich durcheinendergebracht habe.
Das passiert Muttersprachlern auch, keine Sorge :).
Kleine Korrektur: Es hat sehr gut funktioniert. Klappen ist fuer “kurze” Sachen, die DU versuchst. Zum Beispiel umsonst ins Kino zu kommen oder sowas.
Ausgezeichnet! The sentence correction tool was already the thing I return to most often. It got better when you added the follow up question feature, and this is yet another improvement.
One “regression” (though maybe intentional?); the translated version is omitted. Without it you can confirm you have made a correct sentence, but can’t actually be sure that sentence said what was intended.
For example, testing “Wir können High Plains Drifter schaüen.” confirms that all is well except the incorrect umlaut in schauen, but doesn’t actually confirm whether we can watch it or show it. For that you have to do an external lookup.
Still, very nice improved tool!
PS – And best wishes for you and your family!
No problem, English translation is back on :)
Danke!
Found two more bugs:
The explanations sometimes appear in german (maybe not a bug for advanced users :) ), and;
Responses to follow up questions are appearing in (I think) unparsed JSON.
Thanks a lot, yeah, it does show the original json. I refactored the code recently and the follow up chat is separate from the tool itself, so I think I messed something up there. I’ll fix it now.
BTW… are you getting the newsletter now?
The folks at my mailer replied too and said it was your inbox but I forgot to forward it to you what they said. Let me know if you’re curious about it.
It’s really good. It works quickly, the corrections are correct (I think!) and the explanations are very helpful. It seems able to understand ordinary casual English remarkably well. Brilliant!
Almost, if not all, AI commands are only in English, and have been now for some time.
I know for instance from Germany, that all of our multi-nationals often insist on English, certainly when corresponding abroad, unless of course perchance the interlocutor knows German.
In Sweden I’m sure it’s the same.
Swedes of my generation though will know a fairly high level of German too!
This Tool is very helpful. I can correct my sentences and improve my language.
I was able to receive a subscription despite financial struggle with the help of other users and sponsors!! If that happened to be you, thank you so much! I am so grateful for the support and look forward to learning more german! :)