How to add comments to sentences

Every sentence can carry a comment. The sentence is the language; the comment is the reason it is like that.

Keeping those separate matters more than it looks, because the sentence is what becomes a reviewable card later. A sentence with an explanation baked into it is a bad flashcard.

The formatting shortcuts

Three conversions, applied as you type:

You type	You get
:list:	A list with three items, ready to fill in
=>	An arrow, →
-	A bullet point

They exist for one reason: you are writing these during a live lesson, and anything that requires reaching for a formatting toolbar does not get done. => in particular gets used constantly, because most corrections are naturally shaped as this → that.

What to actually write

Three formats cover almost everything.

The correction pair

The single most useful thing you can put in a comment. Two columns, no rule:

- Ich habe geblieben => Ich bin geblieben
- Wir haben gekocht zusammen => Wir haben zusammen gekocht

No explanation attached. The comparison does the teaching, and a student reading two versions side by side extracts the pattern faster than they absorb a stated rule. Where a rule genuinely helps — and with adults it often does — one clause is enough.

Why to keep this to three to five items, and why more reads as a list of failures: correcting students without discouraging them.

The pronunciation note

The comment box is where pronunciation work stops evaporating at the end of the call.

/ç/ not /k/, not /ʃ/
=> start from the y in "yes", take the voice out
- ich, nicht, Küche

Three parts: the target, a physical instruction, and words to test it on. Add the sound the student produced instead and you have given them a minimal pair they can self-test with, which is the only form of checking available to them alone at home.

A student does not need to read the whole IPA chart for this to work — four to eight symbols covering their own problems is the entire requirement. Using the IPA with students.

The one-line rule

=> movement and state verbs take "sein", not "haben"

One line. Adults use rules productively and want them, but the ratio that produces speech is roughly two minutes of rule to twenty of using it — and a comment box is not where a grammar lecture belongs.

Keep it short

A comment long enough to need scrolling will not be reread, which makes it decorative. The test is whether the student can act on it alone, six days later, without you.

“Watch your word order” fails that test. “Wir haben zusammen gekocht => participle goes last” passes it.

If a comment genuinely needs more than two lines, that is usually a signal that the material should be its own sentence — captured, recorded and reviewable — rather than an annotation hanging off someone else’s.