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. This is called the immersion approach. 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.

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.

What is lemma?

Before we continue, let us examine the term "lemma". This is the "core" or "basic" form of the word, a word that you will find in your standard German dictionary.
In the German language, the verbs are conjugated, that is, they change in sentences. "Ich gehe" (I go) and "Du gehst" (you go) both use the same verb "gehen" (to go). The lemma for "gehe" and "gehst" is "gehen". "Gehen" is a word that you will find in any standard German language dictionary.
Another example are nouns. "Haus" in German means "house", and "Häuser" means "houses". In this case, the lemma for "Häuser" would be "Haus", a singular noun that you will find in any standard German language dictionary.
In German, you have declensions. For example, adjectives in front of a noun change their form depending on the grammatical case. For example, "blau", "blauen", "blaue", "blaues" (...) all mean "blue". In this case, for all these words, the lemma would be "blau", a word that you will find in any standard German language dictionary.

This site allows you to use lemmas, but you don't have to use them. Bear in mind that the number of words in your dictionary might be misleading in judging your progress in studying the German language. As you saw in the example of the adjective "blue", you might accumulate words, but in fact, many of these words are just forms of a single word from a standard dictionary.

If you don't use lemmas, the website will consider every word as a lemma. But if you decide to use lemmas, in the top bar on the screen, you will be able to see both the number of words and the number of lemmas, and these numbers will be different. You should consider the number of lemmas as a better indicator of your progress than the number of words.

There are different measurements online but the following table is probably a good orientation for you to get a feeling on which level your German language skills are. For every next level, the number of words doubles.

Level	Lemmas
A1 - beginner	500
A2 - beginner	1000
B1 - intermediate	2000
B2 - intermediate	4000
C1 - advanced	8000
C2 - advanced	16000

How to create a lesson?

If you want to create a lesson, first you will need to find the content. This can be a text from a German news portal, or perhaps subtitles from a YouTube video, maybe some song lyrics that you found online, movie subtitles, or perhaps whole books. On the Resources page you can find links to many different materials suitable for learning German.

After you find the content, click on the "Lessons" option in the menu and create a new lesson. This will open your lessons page:

In this image we can see that no lessons are created. We can also see that the whole storage for lessons is empty (total storage for lessons is limited). To create a new lesson, click on the "New lesson" button, and a page to enter the data for the lesson appears.

This is a simple form to create a new lesson. You can enter the title, the description, and the actual content of the lesson. You can just paste the text you copied in the Content text area. Furthermore, you can also set the Status (when created, it is New by default), specify the level (this is just an information for the author of the lesson), put the link to the video (this is for now only available for YouTube videos), and the link to the source of the content. This is how my form looks after I enter the words for Heinrich Heine's poem "Die Lore-Ley".

After you enter the data, click "Save lesson" to save the lesson. The lessons page will now display your new lesson.

Notice several things. The icon in front of the lesson title indicates status (new, in progress, completed). You can see when the lesson was created and how much space your lesson takes. You have a link available to edit the lesson and a link to delete the lesson. The storage for lessons is limited per user, so if you consume all your space for lessons, please delete some of your old lessons to be able to create a new lesson.

How to view lessons?

Going through text is your main activity on this site. To view the lesson, click on the lesson title or lesson description. This will open a lesson learn page.

On the top of the page, you can see the title of your lesson. Next to the title is an icon that is actually a link to the web page you entered while creating the lesson, as well as the description of the lesson.

If the lesson has a video, you will see the video button. When you are using a desktop computer, playing video using this button makes little sense, since you can open another window with the video and see the text and the video at the same time. But if you use this site on a smartphone, this small video popup might be useful to you.

If your browser supports Web Speech API and has German voices available, you will be able to play audio for the lesson. And next to the audio buttons, you have a menu where you can change status for the lesson (new, in progress, completed) and access edit and delete pages for the lesson.

The content of the lesson is paginated by default. At the top of the content, you can see the total number of pages and your current page. The pagination process takes place on your device (computer, smartphone) and might be slow if your device is slow. If this happens, you can turn of pagination on your user page (click in the top bar where it says "Hi --your user name--").

How to work with words?

Words in your lesson are marked in three ways:

• known words in your dictionary (white background)
• unknown words in your dictionary (yellow background)
• words not in your dictionary (blue background)

Every word is an active element, when you click on a word, a side panel will open.

This side panel is a place where you build your dictionary.

Information that you enter for a word is word, translation, lemma, comment and phrase.

The first text box is "Word", so let us see how word management works on this website. As you can see in the picture, at the top of the slider is the lowercase word "ich" with the icon to reproduce the sound for the word. All words have a lowercase "key". This is not a unique key, but let us talk about it a bit later. The text box "Word" allows me to define a word that will be connected to the key. As you can see in the screenshot, the word "Ich" is displayed in the text box, with capital first letter, because the word in the text is the first word in a sentence. Instead of "Ich" I will enter "ich" (lowercase), since personal pronouns are typically written in lowercase. The ability to modify the word comes from the fact that nouns in German are capitalized, that is, they have the first capital letter. Furthermore, "Lesen" and "lesen" are two different words, the first one is a noun, and the second one is a verb. If you want to have your dictionary in top state, I suggest that you pay attention to setting the data for word to the correct value.

Translation tex tbox is simple, you just enter the translation. You can also choose a translation from the suggestions list below the text box. My advice is to enter a simple translation. For example, "Haus" in German means "house" in English, and that is the best translation for this German word. You might be tempted to enter translations like "a structure used for dwelling, a residence for people to live in", but such long translations are not recommended. Not only don't they provide any real value, but later, in practice part of this web page, too long translations might impact the way tests look in a negative way.

Lemma is a term described at the beginning of this tutorial. If you don't enter a lemma, the word is assumed to be lemma. If you enter a lemma, then the word is connected to that lemma.

Comment is a field where you can enter whatever you want. This field is displayed in your practice questions, so I enter the valuable information based on the word type. For "Haus" for example, since it is a noun, I would enter "das Haus, Häuser". This way, I will always see the article of a noun and a plural form of a noun while I practice my words, and this information will help me remember the important details about the noun used in the practice test. If the word is a verb, for example "gehen", I will put in the comment text box "gehen, geht, ging, gegangen". All the key information about a verb is displayed here: infinitive, 3rd person singular present, preterit and past participle. This helps me learn verbs better. But, as I said, you can put in the comment whatever you want.

Phrase is a single sentence that you can enter, that shows how the word is used in context.

Word text box and translation text box must contain values. Comment and phrase are optional fields.

Word variations

Another thing that is also available are word variations. This is not often used, but in some cases, it can be very valuable.

For example, the German word "sein" can mean two very different things. It can mean "his" (a posessive pronoun) or it can mean "to be" (infinitive verb). So how can I enter the translation for "sein", and what should I put in comment or phrase? The answer is a right-arrow button near the top of the slider. When you click on that button, another panel for entering a word variation will appear, and you can enter two definitions for the word "sein". You can enter multiple word variations, not just two. Another example of a situation where this can be valuable are verbs with separable prefixes (another common thing in the German language). For example, the word "sieht" in a lesson text can mean "(he) sees". But there might be a separable prefix in the same sentence. If that prefix is "aus", in this case, you can add a new variation and enter "sieht aus" in the word textbox, and put infinitive (with other valuable info for you) in the comment text box. Variations can be helpful in dealing with some special characteristics of the German language.

I know this word

A simple checkbox that influences the way words from your dictionary are used. If you click this checkbox to indicate that you know this word, the word will be displayed with a white background. Another important thing is, this word won't appear in practice tests. On the other hand, if you uncheck this checkbox, a word becomes unknown, and is displayed with a yellow background in the lesson text. Also, the internal counter for the word is reset at this time. As you practice this word, every correct response will lower the counter, and every wrong response will raise the counter. If you don't make mistakes, you need 10 correct practice tests with this word, and the website will mark the word as known. If at any time you want to practice this word again, just uncheck this checkbox again.

Finishing a lesson

You can mark a lesson finished at any time, it's up to you. You don't have to add all words to your dictionary. For example, you can have a word "Wilhelmstraße" in your text. There can be thousands of street names in texts, but hundreds or thousands of these words in your dictionary don't really add any real value to your progress in learning the German language. Also, such words have very little or no value in practice tests. I typically add to my dictionary common first names and last names and mark these words "I know this word". That way they won't be highlighted in future texts and these words won't appear in practice tests.

Public lessons

I have decided to publish some content for users, so you can use this content as a lesson. On the Lessons page, just click on "Public lessons" link and select the lessons you want to see.

Lessons currently available follow the copyright laws (all the authors have died a long time ago). In the future, if I get the permission to use some other content, I will place it here for you, so please check this section from time to time.

Conclusion

You can use this website "seriously" and really plan your dictionary, but if you're not interested in that, you can add words to your dictionary in a very simple way. Just check if the value in the word textbox is OK, enter the translation and save the word. "Word" and "Translation" are the only two required pieces of information.

If you want to build your almost semi-professional German dictionary, you have that option as well. Remember, you can export your dictionary, but more about that in the guide about managing my words.