I’m a bad cook, so it’s difficult for me to follow recipes even when they’re written in plain English—let alone sputtered out rapid-fire in German as I try to handle knives and hot pans without maiming myself. But I’ve been cooking more with my boyfriend, and when he bothers to use a recipe all it always ends up as rapid-fire German sputtering even if it started out a written recipe. Clearly it was time to get to work on a flashcard deck of German cooking verbs.

When we learn a new language, we focus on learning the words we actually need to communicate. But eventually, you might want to be able to get across points like “pine tree” without having to say things like “der Baum, der Nadeln statt Blätter hat.”

After almost a year of experimentation, I’m finally satisfied enough with my German Anki template to dare to think it might be useful for others. So in the spirit of Mads Mikkelsen advertising a pretty mediocre Danish beer as “probably the best beer in the world,” I’ll say that this is “probably the best German Anki template on the internet.” You can download it for free.

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!

Depending on your stereotypes of German speakers, you may or may not be surprised to learn that there are a lot of German words for drunk. This post walks through 18 of them as well as words for discussing the aftermath of a night out. I’ve also put them together as a neat set of free Anki cards so you might have a shot at remembering them when the time comes.

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.