unable to implement - Separated words selection

I love this website, it really speeds up the process of acquisition. But I find myself missing this one thing, so I thought I'd ask here.

I'd really like a feature that allows me to select two or more words that are separated by some other text. Consider this German sentence: "Er ruft seine Freundin an". It would be much faster to press some button, like ctrl, and select only "ruft" and "an", as opposed to finding "anrufen" in some dictionary. It's literally one word, and that would be nice to see its definition right here and there, without needing to translate it somewhere else or looking up the meaning of the sentence as a whole. Is there something like that? If not, it would be great if it will be implemented someday

From your description, I can't tell exactly how this would work. I don't know if it's possible, but if we could enable multiple word selection using ctrl, those words would go into google translate. So "ruft an" would go into google translate. Is that what you want? When you explain, please keep in mind that I do not speak German.

Well, when you say 'go into google translate', do you mean that it would open up a new tab? That would still be faster than manually typing it in, but I think it would be neater if translation appeared in that little section to the right of where passages normally are, where definitions of individual words and sentences are located. For context: 'rufen' in German means to call someone, like to shout someone's name, but 'anrufen' means to call somebody by phone. German grammar requires this 'an' to go to the end of a sentence in certain cases, but 'anrufen' still remains one word that carries a single 'meaning unit' so to speak. That's why this feature will be immensely convenient for languages that do this kind of thing. English also does that, think 'call this guy out'. But in German, this auxiliary part always goes to the end of a sentence, while the main part is closer to the beginning. So with current functionality, to understand just one verb I need to either select whole sentences or translate them separately.

koko.raari wrote:

Well, when you say 'go into google translate', do you mean that it would open up a new tab?

Before I get too far ahead of myself, I don't know if this is even possible. But no, I meant "ruft an" would be what gets translated, rather than "Er ruft seine Freundin an". "anrufen" would not be translated - this is my main point of confusion, I want to make sure you are not expecting the program to "read ruft" an and know that you need "anfufen" translated.

Actually, I see the tech team turned down a similar request in the past. Is this what you are talking about?

markoSSS' idea is similar but too advanced. Translating 'ruft an' will be enough to understand what 'anrufen' means, the same applies to any other verb of this kind. Directly translating what is selected will do the job, so it's really the same functionality that already exists, but with the ability to select words that are separated by other words, that's it.

Here's how it might look like:

Unfortunately, that would be a brand new kind of entity. It can't be treated like a single word or phrase - it wouldn't show up the next time you saw it, or be highlighted, for example. If the site becomes more profitable, we can look at this again, but for the time being it would cost too much to implement. Sorry about that. 

No problem, it's just a little thing. Thank you for what you are doing, it's hard to overestimate the value of free education, especially when it's so convenient compared to other methods!