Low ebb...

I don't know what it is, but in the last few days I've felt somewhat unmotivated. I still haven't managed to do the active lesson I was last up to. So, not a very exciting update in that respect!

In positive news, I still feel better all the time listening to german radio...

Still, I do have some useful links for other german learners to share/record here for my own benefit. First, there's the Google Translator Toolkit, which makes a side-by-side and phrase-by-phrase translation easier to manage. There are a few drawbacks from the point of view of a learner - one is that you can't edit the source language text - you need to edit the original file and re-upload. Phrase-by-phrase is probably the way to go for beginners/intermediate who are using this tool to produce translations they will use themselves to understand texts better. It's not necessarily the way to go for translations.

As for the quality of the translations, and the selection of the correct words to capture the intended nuance, I really like Linguee. It's brilliant - check it out for yourself. You can see the word/phrase used in a number of high-quality translation sources (and some perhaps lesser quality :-) ) which really helps to figure out the intended sense for your situation. There are always words and phrases that Google Translate just can't come up with good translations for on its own (yet).

Another couple of useful sites are:

http://www.verbix.com - for fully conjugating german verbs
http://abkuerzungen.woxikon.de/abkuerzung - for looking up german abbreviations. Very handy :-)




I look forward to having news of more substantial progress for my next post!