Test Your German Vocabulary Online

My new addiction: Vokabel.com. Don't be thrown off by the rickety, 90's-tastic look and feel to the Web site. It's actually an incredibly effective tool for learning new German words and bolstering your German vocabulary.

It's typing intensive because you actually have to type in the German version of the English word generated. (It's not multiple choice). So as with any typing it can, after a while, begin to strain das Handgelenk (wrist. I learned it on Vokabel).

Probably the worst of the stylistic downsides to Vokabel is the lack of an umlaut - you have to add "e" after whichever vowels you want to be umlauted. But that's fine by me because I don't have umlauted letters on my keyboard anyway.

I'm recommending this online German vocabulary test for one simple reason: it works. I learned new words yesterday that I found myself thinking about today, and even identified one in a book I'm reading in German.

So now test your German vocabulary online, and learn new German words here. Good luck!

Is WordReference.com Better Than Leo.org for Translating German Words?

I like Leo.org a lot but it just failed me.

We're doing an assignment writing an autobiography using a list words given us in the past participle. Along with their infinite forms, all these German words' meanings were gone over in class.

But I'm cheating and looking them up in English, to make sure I'm getting the definitions right (class is taught entirely in German).

So as I learned in class the word gekuscht is the past participle form of kuschen. To find the meaning I went to leo.org but pulled up nothing, they just offered a link to a forum page written all in German and didn't bother with it, I just wanted a straight English answer. I moved on:

Wordreference.com's German-English dictionary wins today. The meaning of the German word kuschen is "to knuckle under".

Not bad, Wordreference.com, especially considering you're the new kid on the German/English translation scene and Leo.org's been around forever.

A German Saying About The Weather, Translated

This year, the weather has been strange. Time for another German saying about the weather. Let's see if I can translate this. If not, hopefully our Austrian transplant Ramsey or our native Swiss friend Roman can help us out :-)

Here's we go:

Geht die Sonne feurig auf, folgen Wind und Regen drauf

Okay, I'm closing my eyes and not going to the German-English translator Leo.org for help. Here's my first take. I think this is a very, very simple expression about how when the sun is fiery, the wind folds under and the rain stops.

Now, let's see how close I am. First, I'm going to look up the words I'm not sure about:

geht...auf, well, I told you that I already studied German. So I know enough about German's separable prefixes to save time and look up the single word aufgehen:

aufgehen - to rise. Well, that makes sense :-)

feurig - I was right! It means "fiery" in German! Sweet.

folgen - to ensue, to follow.

drauf - to be on the ball

or it could be a shortened version of darauf:

darauf - upon

Hm. Upon the ball? The ball being the "fiery sun"? Ouch. I'm confused about drauf.

Let's try it anyway. How about something like, "If the sun rises brightly, it will be followed by wind and rain". (Here in Austria, truer words have never been spoken). I think we're good to go. And now I'm also way less confused about drauf. It's short for darauf and one of the infinite definitions of darauf generated by Leo.org was "afterward".

This was a pretty good German sayings sesh. If you want more, visit our master page of German sayings. Enjoy!

German Word for Juice: Apple, Orange, Lemonade & Tea

I recently blogged the German words for healthy foods. Now let's focus not only on the German word for juice, which is Saft, but on what seems to be a specialty at the market here in Klagenfurt, Austria:

Orange-Karottensaft

Can you guess what that means? Fresh squeezed and grated, it's delicious.

The German names of other typical juices are:

der Apfelsaft - apple juice
der Orangensaft - orange juice
die Limonade - lemonade
der Eistee - iced tea
die Saftbar - juice bar

As you might have guessed, the sometimes-sweltering Austrian August has made me thirsty. Speaking of which, hears another near-cognate:

der Durst - thirst

Have another juice you love? List it in the comments below!

German Sayings, Expressions, Proverbs & One-Liners Part I

Here begins my occasional series on German Sayings, inspired by a recent post on a German language podcast blog. I'll devote another entry to reviewing that blog but what's important now is how she closed the latest post: "everything has an end, only sausage has two! :-)"

Even better in German:

Alles hat ein Ende, nur die Wurst hat zwei! :-)

Such encapsulated wit & wisdom is a fun and entertaining way to learn the language, and I'm driven to learn more and more German proverbs, let's begin:

Juni kalt und nass, lässt leer Scheune und Fass

So I had to look up half the words on Leo.org and I still don't get it. "June cold and wet" then what lässt means is beyond me. The word leer could mean anything, I'm gonna go with "windy", after that Scheune means "barn" and Fass means "barrel" so "...barn and barrel". Off to a pretty shaky start. All I know is it's a Bauernregeln which means "country proverb" and it's about the weather. So is this one:

Hat der Berg ein' Hut, wird das Wetter gut. Trägt er einen Degen, gibt es einen Regen

Easy. "If the mountain has a hut, the weather will be good. If it's got a sword, there will be rain". That makes absolutely no sense. On the upside, I knew practically all the words. But then the word I had to look up, Degen (which means "sword") is effectively the wrench in the works.

I've about had it with German expressions, more later and in the meantime tons of German proverbs here.

UPDATE: I'm now translating German sayings on a regular basis. Browse the constantly growing list below to find German sayings and their English translations, and follow me as I stumble through the process of translation. Sometimes I fail. That's where you come in and correct me. Or read the comments of people who correct me. It's great fun. So what are you waiting for? Click on any of the German sayings below!

A German saying about the sunrise.

The 11 Healthiest Words in German

I translated Well's 11 healthiest food recommendations and turned it into a shopping list (pictured) theoretically fit for any Austrian or German supermarket.

It's actually two lists. First, I did as much as I could with the Berlitz German Compact Dictionary that I'd picked up in the London airport. That's the first list.

The second list reflects what I couldn't find in Berlitz and so went to Leo.ORG, a helpful online German-English dictionary, to translate the rest. Now I easily could have done the whole list with Leo, but I wanted to see how far Berlitz would take me. Hopefully this will give you a slight idea of what it's like to live by Berlitz, and decide for yourself if you want to consider buying it.

It's up to you, but if I could do it over I'd pass on the Berlitz and invest in a better German dictionary. But until I find one I'll rely on Leo it's free, and maybe take Berlitz with me when I go shopping but up to now the idea hasn't been appealing.

Oh and one more thing: when looking up these words I didn't always pay attention to each word's gender (der, die and das) because at this point I've been employing an improvised pidgin of German mixed with English curse words which is surprisingly effective. Where I'm at right now, trying to approximate coherent German grammar isn't even a specter on the horizon yet.

Let's start with the Berlitz dictionary's list of English words and their meaning in German:

beets - Runkelübe or Rote Bete "red beets"
cabbage - Kohl
cinnamon - Zimt
(pomegranate) juice - Saft
dried plums - trocken "dried", Pflaume "plums" (i didn't look up "prunes")
pumpkin seeds - Kürbis "pumpkin", Samen "seeds"
sardines - Sardine
frozen blueberries - eiskalt or gefroren "frozen"*, Heidelbeere "blueberries"
grater - Reibe**

*i asked the cashier and she had yet a different word for "frozen" but I forget what it was
**okay this wasn't on the list but you can take a great to plenty of the foods

Now here's the Leo list:

Swiss chard - der Mangold (has got to be healthy)
pomegranate (juice) - Granatapfel
turmeric - die Gelbwurz or die Kurkuma

Not bad, Berlitz. You only missed like two and a half from the list. Still, I gotta say pomegranate is the coolest because the German word reveals the biblical origins, in high school I learned that the apple in the Garden of Eden was a pomegranate, according to some scholars, so it's interesting that it's Granatapfel because Apfel means "apple" in German.

So anyway basically I got annoyed/bored/tired as usual halfway through the shopping experience but made off with a few of the items. One uniquely Austrian health food is the pumpkin seed oil, it's pitch green and they sell it bottled like olive oil. I've heard it's very hard to find in the US. It's got amazing health properties and I bought the oil instead of the seeds which incidentally also were available but pomegranate juice wasn't, although apple juice was.

Here's to your Health.