One cheap way to implement this would be to forget about trying to support separable verbs in the reader, but support them via editing of the flash card. For example, suppose you come across the sentence "Wir stehen sehr früh am Morgen auf.", and you recognize that "aufstehen" is a separable verb. You would click on the main stem, "stehen", and that would get saved as a card.

Then when you edit the card, the "Deutsch" field would support a syntax like "stehen ... auf", and use it to understand which words to mask and show when the card is shown in Learning mode.

No where near perfect, but better than nothing.

One way to do this would be to actually parse the text, e.g. with spacy or Link Grammar Parser. This would take more server resources, though.

Hi Corey - yes there is a way to turn merging of phrases off. Open the reader sidebar by clicking the little "three horizontal lines" menu icon at the top right of the reader page. Select the "AA" tab, and under "Translation Behavior" click "Don't Merge"

Even for paid members, selecting a 12 word phrase won't always allow the user to translate a separable verb as there can often be very long strings of words between the two parts. It would be better if phrases could be manually multi-selected. In fact, is there a way to turn off the automatic connection of two adjacent words into a phrase? I'd rather have to deliberately create phrases. Would also cut down on unnecessary Translate API traffic.

Here is the link https://youtu.be/t5j5rBmaCSU with video about how it's done in http://www.hamatata.com/. It's a site to watch movies with english to russian translator ONLY. I don't know how to make it in readlang especially in phones and pads, but I think it's possible to make for PC.

1. Left mouse click.
2. The same as in readlang but even part of the word can be translated.
3. Right click. The way to translate German fits exactly.

That would also be useful for Dutch although usually just the main verb gives a good sense of the meaning of the separable verb.

if you highlight the whole phrase it usually picks up on the the prefix.

Other similar systems have the same problem. A possible solution could be to be give the possibiity to select individually first the prefix and then the verb and have a way to tell the system to search for the translation as a single word in the order it was selected.