Guide to German lessons

Introduction

This is the core functionality of this site. As soon as you learn some basics about the German language, you can start consuming content in the German language. The more you use the language, the better your progress in learning that language will be. There are materials available online that are appropriate for complete beginners (A1 level) to very advanced students (C1 and C2 levels).

On the Resources page you can find links to many different materials suitable for learning the German language, for total beginners and for advanced students. If you are a beginner, good and well known materials are Nico's weg and Extr@@ auf Deutsch. Subtitles for these shows are not published on this site because of copyright issues, but you can find the text you can use for your lessons on YouTube. You can find instructions on how to get the subtitles from YouTube on this page: How to get YouTube subtitles

As you consume content through lessons on this site, you will be able to grow your own private dictionary. The number of words in your dictionary and the number of lemmas are, in a way, a measure of your success in learning the German language.

Basic instructions

You can create your own lesson by going to "My lessons" in the top menu and clicking on "New lesson". You need to add the title and the content for the lesson. There are some other fields you can enter, but they are not required.

After you have your lesson, you can click on it to view it. At the beginning, most of your words will be marked blue which means that this word is not in your dictionary, so it is new for you. When you add a word to your dictionary, it will be marked yellow. It is marked yellow because you still have to learn the word through the practice section of this site. When you learn a word through the practice section, that word will have no marking.

How to add a word to your dictionary

When you see a word in the lesson's text marked blue just click on it to add it to your dictionary. A panel will show where you can enter the data for that word:

key word - this is the word from the lesson, you cannot change that. It is always lowercase.
word - here you can enter the real word. For example, the word "Du" at the start of the sentence has the first capital letter, but in fact the word is "du". You can also enter multiple words here, for example: for the key word "sehen" in the lesson, you can enter "siehts an", if, in fact, "sehen" is used in a sentence as part of the verb "ansehen".
translation - this is a required field
lemma - here you can enter the lemma for a word, the word that you can find in classic dictionaries. For example, "gehen" is a lemma for the following words: gehe, gehst, geht, ging, gegangen... You can enable or disable usage of lemma's in your user's preferences.
comment - you can put whatever you want here. For example, for a noun "Morgen", you can put "der Morgen, Morgen", and for the word "gehen", you can put "gehen, geht, ging, gegangen". Comments will be displayed during your practice tests, and the information you enter here can help you learn the word better.
phrase - a phrase where this word is used, which is also displayed during the practice phase.

Why are lemmas important? The amount of words you have in your dictionary indicate your progress in learning. But, words in your dictionary like "gehe", "gehst" and "geht" still refer to a single lemma "gehen", so a pure number of words might be misleading. The number of lemmas is a better measure. It is estimated that you should be able to confidently use 2000 lemmas for B1 level and 4000 lemmas for B2 level. If you don't enter data for lemma, the word itself will be considered as a lemma.

Multiple words for a single key word? You also have the ability to enter multiple words for a single key word by clicking on the arrow button. For example, the key word "sehen" in the text can be the verb "sehen" or part of the verb "ansehen". You can enter different data for each word connected to the key word. You can enable or disable this feature in your user preferences.

Suggestions? When the panel for entering word data appears, suggestions will be shown to you so you don't have to type in the data. Don't trust these suggestions completely, as they come from other users. You can enable or disable the display of suggestions in your user's preferences.

How to mark a word as known? If you know the word, you can always mark it as known by clicking on the checkbox at the bottom. Known words won't be colored in texts, and they won't show up in your practice questions. You can also always mark a word as unknown, and have the site ask you questions about this word in the practice section.

Public lessons

Some lessons are already prepared and available on this site. You use these texts in the same way you use your private lessons, except you cannot edit the content of these lessons.