January 7th, 2010
Dear fellow language lovers around the world,
A very warm welcome to the new year 2010! Warm is probably not the best way to describe the current temperatures in Germany. It is really chilly, actually.
While we are working on new products just sit back, relax and test your knowledge with one of our quizzes about the New Year around the world:
(Yes, I know, the test is one year old, but the questions are still up to date 
)
Thomas
Tags: 2010, new year
Posted in Sprach- & kategorielos | Comments Off
December 18th, 2009
a Happy New Year!
Before you head home to spend some time with your family & friends, to eat some great food and to just relax we wanted to wish you Happy Holidays! One weekend of Christmas shopping left and then it’s sit back and relax time.
Thank you for helping us grow our business by sending us emails with cool new ideas, commenting on little bugs, suggesting improvements or just adding new words and quizzes to bab.la. You have made a tremendous impact! We hope to see you back next year!
Andreas
for the entire bab.la team
PS: If you are still sending out Christmas greetings and are tired of using the same text over and over again, how about writing Merry Christmas in another language? We have put together some personal greetings in our phrasebook (you can change the language on the top right hand corner).
Tags: Christmas, greetings
Posted in Sprach- & kategorielos | Comments Off
November 26th, 2009
The days of misspelling words are nearly over. At least when you use more advanced programs such as MS Word with their auto-correct functions. In the blogger world we still see many spelling mistakes but that’s probably due to the fact that there is no standard auto-correct function installed in Wordpress. Anyway, our dictionary search still allows you to type just as you like. We could even called it a feature but let’s be modest (and honest): It’s always been that way. This allows us to do some cool data analysis on the words that couldn’t be found. And after some tweaking and crunching we finally completed our Top Misspelled Words 2009 list.
Big round of applause for each seperate word – they are just awsome to look at. Wether you like maffia or belive in advertizing, particulary the dogy words adress cool misspellings. There, I made it – each top 10 word in my post. Way to go!
Andreas
Tags: 2009, auto-correct, misspelled words, misspelling
Posted in Sprechdurchfall | 2 Comments »
November 18th, 2009
The Oxford University Press recently announced the Word of the Year 2009: to unfriend. It is the process of removing someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook. So finally we found a way of breaking up the easy way: Just unfriend the person on Facebook, usually the person won’t even notice it unless he/she looks into his contacts. I guess it is similar to not answering phone calls any more. So, if you want to keep up the good old way of “announcing” the break up do the following:
1. Set your relationship status to single.
2. Unfriend the person.
3. Send a direct message “It’s over”, or if you want to make it more public just post a status update “Let’s just be (unfriended) friends.”
4. Join all single groups on Facebook like “I am single and I am hot”, “Single and sexy”, “Men are plain stupid” or “Women: STOP talking”, “Who needs a boy/girlfriend when I have me?”, “Me, myself and I” to show your true committment.
5. Don’t forget to go all the way: Unfollow on Twitter (is there a unfollow Monday or so on Twitter?), delete the person from your Skype list etc.
If this doesn’t work, we recommend some of the expressions in the “When all else fails” section of our complaints survival guide.
Now, that’s it. Over and out.
Andreas
Posted in Sprache | Comments Off
October 23rd, 2009
We have added a tiny little i next to each word. When you click on it you will see a drop-down menu with a few functions. The most important new function is “Edit this entry”. Now you can not only suggest new words but also edit all existing entries. Our dictionaries are not perfect yet 
and that’s why we need the power of our users, YOU!
Now you can:
- add grammar to an entry
- add a category if missing
- correct spelling mistakes
- include an explanation for the context
As with new entries, every edited entry needs 10 positive votes from other users in order to be verified. Until then, the old entry will be shown.
The drop-down menu looks like:
The edit window opens underneath the entry:
A big thanks to all the users who have suggested this feature in the past. It took us some time but we think you’ll like it.
Andreas
Tags: dictionary, edit, user editing
Posted in bab.la news | Comments Off
