1 · One sentence
One sentence in ten languages
The colours show what each word does: blue for the verb frames, green for the linking word, orange for words that change the tense or make it negative or a question. Look at where each language puts the verb frames and the linking word.
How it works
How it works
A door is a verb frame with a gap: "I want to ___". A turn changes its tense, or makes it negative or a question. Glue is a linking word like "because", which can change word order. Phrases and vocabulary fill the gaps.
2 · Change it
Change the sentence
Pick a sentence, then put it in the past, make it negative, or turn it into a question. Every language updates at the same time, so you can see which words move.
Tap or hover a word to highlight its match in each language. Dashed words have no English match.
Tap a word
3 · Word order
Word order compared with English
Each line joins an English word to the word doing the same job. Straight lines mean the same order as English; crossing lines mean the order changes.
4 · Tenses
Which word shows the tense?
English has nine forms of "go" here. Pick one and see which words carry the tense in each language. German needs fewer: "ich gehe" covers both "I go" and "I'm going".
The count under each cell is how many of the languages below have a real form for it. The rest use a workaround or have no such form.
Pick a cell, then tap the word you think carries the tense in each language.
The parts
The parts
Every sentence on this page is built from these. The right-hand note says how much of each part carries over from one language to the next.
5 · Next
What to do with this
Every sentence above used the same few parts. Look them up, say them out loud in Drill, or write longer answers in Write.