Scrolling through Reddit today, I came across a great new website for German learners made by an r/German user. The site is called Interpolly, and it allows you to easily create German vocabulary quizzes from YouTube videos. I checked it out and really liked the site, so I thought I’d write up a little review as a way of saying thanks to the developer for making this free tool for German learners.

Hiking has been an escape for me throughout the pandemic, and I like to imagine where I might go hiking once this is over. I suppose we’re at the “sanguine tourism fantasies” stage of covid-19… Anyways, all that daydreaming inspired this free Anki deck of German hiking vocabulary. Even though travel restrictions mean most of us won’t be flying off to hike in the Alps anytime soon, we can at least upgrade our pandemic daydreams with a dose of linguistic authenticity!

One of my major frustrations with Anki is the stiffness of cloze-formatted cards. They just don’t play nice with basic card types. So while I often want to incorperate cloze deletions into my decks, making seperate notes for clozes of my example sentences is simply beyond my effort tolerance. So instead of spending an extra 30sec/card, I did the clearly easier thing and spent a week figuring out how to get basic cards to automatically make cloze deletions based on example sentences.

Learning to write in a new laguage can be intimidating, especially if you’re learning alone. Like speaking, writing is a productive skill which makes it impossible to learn passively. Reading will improve your writing, to be sure. But if you want to write, you need to write!

I received a lot of reccomendations of the Pimsleur language programs from family members back when I was preparing to head to Denmark in 2019. So naturally, I picked up Pimsleur Danish 1, never finished it, and forgot about it until about a month ago when I found the little blue Pimsleur logo lurking in my app drawer. I had been focusing on German exclusively until then, but given what I’d paid for Pimsleur (too much, see below), my stinginess demanded that I give Danish another shot.

How do you say “class of 2020” in German? TLDR: you might get away with Jahrgang 2016, but that translation might not carry all the meaning you expect it to—especially if you’re from the US.