Thanks a lot for the feedback. You are right, “All levels” mixed in words from every level which is how Abfindung turned up so early. We’ve changed it. New words now start with everyday A1–A2 vocabulary and step up gradually as you learn, with a few slightly harder ones mixed in. You can still choose exact levels under Settings → Levels, on the All words page, and in most of the games.

About the example sentences: fair point. Some of them are more complex than the word they’re meant to teach, and a few vice versa. We’re working through them, starting with the beginner words. If one stands out as off, send it our way and it goes to the top of the list. Thanks for trying it!

I just did some words to get today's completion.

I had the expectation it would be easier words, since I didn't specify a level (nor do I see how), but I was stumped by the word for "severance pay." And that doesn't seem like a word I generally would need in basic, every day conversation.

The example sentences seem above a basic level, too.

Edit - I found it. Looks like it defaults to all levels.

Yes, we use AI tools, Claude and ChatGPT among them, the way a lot of small projects do now. They’re tools, not the authors: a lot of hands-on work has gone into the content, and it keeps being improved. Vokabahn has been in the works for over three months. It started as something to help ourselves and other learners, and grew into a full study mode plus several games.

The sources aren’t hidden either. They’re on the About page (vokabahn.com/about/legal): English Wiktionary for the meanings and Tatoeba for many of the example sentences, credited under their licences.

On blocking AI crawlers: it’s a small, newish site, and bots were hitting it with hundreds of thousands of requests. That slows things down for actual learners and costs real money to serve. Search engines are welcome; scrapers and training crawlers aren’t. It’s free to use, and it stays free. (AI still crawls the site and gets all the data it needs from it, but this reduces it)

Vokabahn isn’t meant to be anyone’s only study material; it’s a helper that makes daily practice fun, especially the games. If someone picks up even a couple of new words, that’s already a win. A few learners have passed 2,000 words each ( Since the 1st of October ) , and honestly, that’s what gives us the motivation, and also the experience of doing something fun for us and hopefully for others.

Am I correct in assuming that the "we" in the post above is Claude and you, and that that also answers my dodged data source question above?

Good catch on both: nouns now show der/die/das on every answer, and the wrong answers are as hard as the right one, so C2 is properly C2. Thanks for trying it.

Done 90 words now, bit annoyed that none of them were new to me even while I selected progressively higher levels (C2 for the last 15 or so). I definitely don't know the entire dictionary just yet 😅

And it also just occurred to me that you're missing the gender that you're supposed to learn with the word, else you just end up having to learn everything twice. Which seems like a pretty basic omission 🤔

What's the source for the data (ranking, definitions, parts of speech, examples, audio fragments, A1–C2 categorisation, ...)?

FYI, the website is dead. Bit surprised to see that already after two months

English translation by Samantha Rose Hill with Genese Grill

German speakers also say "Berliner" a lot ... especially around Berlin.

Sorry, fixed.

Lemmy.world is my 'main' name. I've made a secondary lemmy.ca account when Lemmy.world once had some technical issues a few years ago. So lemmy.ca is still me but I don't check it often at all!

a wide range of Comprhensible Input recs

I did knew this website. Thank you.

Already saw it mentioned in the thread, but putting this top level with a link: https://learngerman.dw.com/en/learn-german/s-9528

For a wide range of Comprhensible Input recs, you can always look through https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/German and try stuff out and see what you like.

If you like learning with songs, @dragontamer has a nice post with suggestions here: https://threadiverse.link/lemmy.world/post/41037513

On YouTube there is plenty of animation channel that make shorts story for you to listen and repeat after. The episodes are usually sorted by level following the European language level framework (A1-A2 is complete beginner to false beginner)

I like Hallo Deutschschule because they are sometimes quite ironic. But they are plenty.

Dw.com is a great place for beginners. It has exercices paired with video content. Such as Nicos Weg. Video content specially design for learners that are also fun are not easy to find.

There, you'll find movies and series made on purpose for learning.

Arte has also german version and german subtitle available for almost all its show. It has also sometimes english subtitle.

All for free on arte.tv/en.

To imerse myself with the language I like to watch kids show in german. On YouTube I've found Total Genial, Totally Spies, H2O Plötzlich Meerjungfrau, Bibi und Tina, Code Lyoko... Kids/teens tv series have a story easy to follow from mostly the images. YouTube often have autosubtitle to go with it.

If I want to find a german title for a specific show I go on its wikipedia page and switch language to german.

I have no concrete links, but I imagine you'd find good free Anki decks on AnkiWeb or GitHub and a discord server or two to learn from disboard or discadia.

Ymmv per server and community, but Anki is well-regarded in foss and academic circles for effective learning. Viel Glück!

Hi! Wie geht's?

Hi Frankie! 😊

I'll look into it. Might be useful if they have Videos I use on the platform

Look into Dearrow for better titles and thumbnails. AI could still be a fallback, but crowd-sourced or human curated would be better. With a good title, empty description can be fine, unless the creator linked to something useful in it.

I'm open for constructive feedback but this isn't really helpful. The Title & Descriptions are AI generated based on the original Descriptions & The Video Transcripts. The original descriptions rarely reflected the video contents so that's why I did that to make it more obvious what the Video is about, unless you prefer descriptions that just contain links to affiliate programs or empty descriptions. The Videos are still original & unchanged so I don't see a big problem. Also every video has a Feedback option if you find something that you disagree with.

That’s a lot of AI slop you generated there. Congrats.