Phraseum – a web clipping app for language learning

EDIT 2025: Sadly, it seems the website has gone.

I get a lot of email newsletters every day, most get a quick scan and then deleted, but every so often there is a gem in one of them. One of those I spotted a few days ago: phraseum

Phraseum doesn’t teach you a language. Instead it lets you collect useful phrases or just words which you come across in a foreign text.

I have just tried it out and I like it!

In order to get started you need to register and add the ‘clipping button’ to your browser and that’s it. Now, every time you read a text in a foreign language (of course I hope it’s  a German text 🙂 ) and you come across an interesting phrase you can clip it, save it and read/ use it later – very handy if you are doing research for a particular topic. For example if you are researching German websites about the environment, you can now save any sentences that may come in handy for your research. All you do is highlight the text you want to save:

Click on the clipping button and the text appears in your phraseum folder. You can then tag it with keywords, so that you can find it better onve you have saved a lot of phrases. I just used one word (“environment”) here but you can use more. Then just click ‘save and close’ and you’re done.

You can make your saving public or private, If you leave it public, other can see it (the phrase, not who saved it) and, if it’s a useful phrases, save it for themselves. As it’s  a new site, there aren’t many phrases yet, but give it time and it may turn into an interesting read.

I have only saved 5 phrases for a quick trial, but knowing the clipping button is there, I probably clip a lot more from now on. if I want to save a whole page, I’ll continue using Evernote but if it’s only a word or sentence, I’ll use phraseum from now on, especially as it also offers a translation button which takes you to google translate with the sentence already translated – all in all a very useful tool if you’re only interested in small bits of text.

What do you think? Could you see it as a useful tool for your German learning? Try it an tell me afterwards, I’d love to know!