Cologne’s Carnival, also known as the Fifth Season, is one of the more strange and colorful events in Germany, attracting tourists from all over the world. From extravagant costumes, biting political satire that doesn’t shy away from even the most controversial topics, to non-stop music, mandatory drunkenness and dancing, the festival is a feast for…
Hacks & Tutorials
3 Ways To Start Learning How To Code
Knowing how to code is becoming an increasingly important skill for many different fields of expertise. Software is everywhere: in our cars, telephones, books and even refrigerators. While learning to code is not a magic bullet to land the perfect job, it can nevertheless be an great asset in many different situations. Especially for people…
Games
Find German Language Games on Steam
When I first started gaming back in the nineties in Germany, there weren’t too many games around in my native language. While most adventure games were eventually translated into German, the English originals were simply much easier to come by. So I took the challenge and made my way through the first Monkey Island and…
German
False Friends: 5 German Words That Don’t Mean What You Think They Do
What are “false friends”? German and English are both Germanic languages, so they not only share many grammatical features but also have a lot of similar words. For example, when you know English and you hear the German word “Haus” you immediately know what it means: house. The spelling is different, but it sounds exactly…
Online Business
Streamline Your Podcasting Workflow With Auphonic Audio Post Processing
Podcasting can be a great way to get in touch with your audience in a different way. Whether you’re an independent teacher offering weekly study tips or an indie publisher sharing tools and strategies, podcasts make it easier to communicate your message in a direct and very personal manner. There are many different programs and…
Culture
30 German Movies For Kids, Adults & Cinephiles
Learning German with stories is an effective and fun way to practice and enjoy yourself at the same time. Learning German with movies is another excellent strategy for immersion. Today, I’d like to present a number of German movies for learners (in no particular order). Where available, I’ve added vocabulary and exercise resources to help…
Meet detectives Baumgartner & Momsen and learn German effortlessly with special emphasis on idioms and natural language crammed with humor and suspense.
learn more Hacks & Tutorials
How To Create Custom Bit.ly Links
Shortlinks have been with us for a number of years now. Whether it’s bit.ly, tinyurl, or another service, URL shortening has risen in popularity together with Twitter, where every character counts and the only good link is a short link. But besides shortening, another reason for using short links is to beautify long and ugly URLs….
Hacks & Tutorials
Create Your Own Flashcards For Kindle
Flashcards are a time-tested tool of memorizing almost anything, from new vocabulary and technical terms to copious amounts of trivia facts. And nowadays we don’t even need to waste paper for creating them. There are many apps that allow you to create your own flashcards. If you own the new Kindle Paperwhite, there’s even an…
Indie Publishing
Turn Your Research Paper Into A Book: 5 Reasons To Self-Publish Your Work
Recently, I stumbled over an old research paper I had written in university. The term paper (a short treatise on classical perceptions of melancholy as a disease of the “four temperaments”) had survived on a backup copy of my website, stowed away on a disused hard-drive. And surprisingly, as much as I had sweated over…
German
Fed Up With German Articles and Gender? Let This Free Tool Fix Your Emails
Many people don’t appreciate the fact that English nouns have no gender until they come upon another language which does. French and Spanish nouns have both masculine and feminine gender, which is bad enough for most learners, but German learners have to put up with yet another one: the neuter. Admittedly, it’s not as bad…
