Often (usually) in German expressions will be split into multiple “pieces” within a sentence, with other words in the middle. For example, a sentence I’m looking at right now is the following: “Starten Sie mit einer Panoramawanderung in den Tag…” The expression I’d like to save is “in den Tag starten”, or at least “starten…in den Tag”.
And of course, there are also the split verbs, like, say “einladen”, which will be used, for example as follows: “Ich lade dich zu meiner Geburtstagsparty ein”, with the last half of the verb in the second position and the first part of the verb in the last position.
Can you save an expression or word that comes in multiple pieces without saving the words in the middle as though they were part of the expression (which they are not)? As far as I’m concerned, having to save all of the words in the middle is quite a poor compromise. Everyone practicing their German on this site is going to come across this issue and I’m wondering how people deal with it well.
I often wish I could do that too (even in Romance languages) but I doubt there’s currently a way to do it. I just hope I come across the same phrase in a more LingQ-able form later on.
I would link the headword, and in the translation I would repeat the whole phrase and then give the translation: link: lade, translation: einladen - invite. An other possibility is to link the whole sentence, “Ich lade dich zu meiner Geburtstag ein” , to give the translation: einladen - to invite, and, if you want, to give the translation of the whole sentence as a note (“enter note”) .
What I’m doing for Dutch (where you have exactly the same “problem”) is to write something like “~ [second part] = [translation]” or “[second part]~ = [translation]” akin to how print dictionaries treat it. I may also include the first letter of the actual word. That way, it still is harder to learn/recall the word in question.
OK thanks Car2017! On due consideration, I think that for split verbs in German I’m just going to do the second part of what you and bensheelings are suggesting: highlight and translate the whole sentence. I don’t know about Dutch, but in German the main part of the verb may have a meaning that is unrelated to the verb all together (i.e. “hören” is to hear but “aufhören” is to stop. “halten” is to keep or to hold but “verhalten” is to behave etc…) So saving the meaning of the base word is not necessarily useful to me.
I may stick in a sample unrelated sentence from the dictionary that includes the word all together, maybe in square parentheses to distinguish it from the real text, if I really want to save the word.
Ress that’s an interesting idea. That’s exactly the type of suggestion I was looking for, as I didn’t realize that that was one of the ways one could handle this with Lingq. Do you have any sample lessons of this type?
P.S. I’m at the C1 level in German. The two examples I gave are actually words I know extremely well and have known for years. I was just using them to explain what I was talking about. The words and expressions I’d be learning are much more rarely used.
It’s the same, but what I meant is that you’d link “hören” but then write “auf~ = to stop” or “aufh~ = to stop” in the translation. That way, I’m not saving the meaning of the base word at all or maybe just in addition (e.g. “hören = to hear; aufh~ = to stop”).