Lingq seems to struggle with separable German verbs. For example, take the following example from a recent Nachrichten Leicht article: “Russland greift die Ukraine mit Raketen an.” greift in this sentence is identified by lingq as “grab, hold”, whereas the correct meaning comes from angreifen (Note the separable an at the end of the sentence), which means “to attack.”
fThere’s unfortunately not any great solutions, but I think LingQ does about as good as it can get…
There’s a couple of ways to handle this:
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LingQ already does in many cases…If you click on greift you’ll see a bunch of tags on top. Angreifen happens to be the first one on mine, but it also has a bunch of others. Aufgreifen, eingreifen, etc. So in many cases LingQ is already autotaggins some of these separable verbs. You can click on these tags and it will bring you to reverso conjugation site where it will show you the meaning. Pretty cool.
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Add a secondary meaning in your LingQ (or look for one that is probably already there). For example, I can create a Lingq with the saved meaning: “grab, hold; (an)greifen - to attack; (auf)greifen - take up; pick up; address”
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Or do similar to #2, but add them as separate definitions that you keep.
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Work in sentence mode and do the sentence translation.
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If it’s a short enough phrase, you could save the phrase. This option is not great as sometimes the phrase is too long to save and also usually it is unique enough that you are never going to see that exact phrase again in different content. So it’s only useful to review in vocabulary.
In most of the common words, you’ll see folks have already done this (you’ll have to swipe up from the top of the pop up to see other’s definitions beyond the one or 2 the original “blue” lingq shows.
It would be totally cool if somehow LingQ could scan the sentence and look for and highlight the separable parts, but that’s probably pretty difficult to get to work right, but who knows, maybe one day…
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With the split verbs in German, we don’t have a way for you to save these properly. However, as long as you are aware of them, you should be fine. You can add a tag for “split verb” to help you identify these when you save the parts. You can sometimes capture both parts of the verb if you select them in a phrase (if the phrase isn’t too long). You can add notes to help you remember. Keeping in mind that the majority of German words are not of this type.
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Hi BeeGeek,
maybe you forgot, that the translation shown on LingQ is a translation made by another user! So he or she could have written a wrong translation. You can choose that one, but you can write your own meaning too.
In this case the translation is not wrong, because the word translation stems from a completely different sentence where “(he/ she) grabs, holds” should be the right translation.
By the way, the same problem is found with learning English with verbs and their specific prepositions.
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Dutch too of course.
This is not a solution to the problem exposed by the OP but it can work as a “complement” to compensate for this problem: does anyone here have a “complete” list of german separable verbs, along with their meanings?
I have struggled to find a good, extensive list that could be turned into flashcards for Quizlet or any similar software. I could only find some with up to 200 verbs approximately but I keep coming accross more and more separable verbs in Lingq that are not reflected in those short lists.
Drilling that type of list could be a good complement to Lingq due to its limitation to tackle this type of verbs
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Hi,
in my opinion, the LingQ version 4 has superiority in marking separate verbs and phrases like “Redewendungen”, which are hard to memorize. Users can do more than 8 words in the old version.