AMD1, Norman Lam

My friend Maik is an international student from Germany and currently a freshman at the University of Michigan. He knows that I am learning German and he said he would try his best to help me if I have any questions. Since I have learned some vocabularies in chapter 1, I recently have been trying to come up with things I want to say in English, and then challenge myself by translating it into German and asking for his correction. Of course being a native speaker, he sometimes will give me words that I have not learned in the class yet (which did confuse me a little bit). However, I am glad to have his help after all, as it's fun and really helps my learning. Some examples I would like to share are as follows:

"Please write on the board"

My tranlation: Screiben Sie auf die Tafel, bitte!

His answer: Schreiben Sie bitte an die Tafel

"I can’t open my eyes"  (as I was too tired in another class!)

My translation: Mein Augen nict auf

His answer: Ich kann meine Augen kaum öffnen

Willkommen!!

Welcome to our class blog!

We will be using this blog throughout the semester for two kinds of assignments:

1. Once per chapter, the homework plan will direct you to post a response to the culture readings for the chapter on the blog.

2. Roughly every other week, the homework plan will direct you to post here for your Abenteuer mit Deutsch (AMD) assignment. First you do a fun activity that involves German, then you post about it. You should spend an hour total on this (maybe 45-55 minutes doing something, 5-15 minutes posting about it). See Was ist ein AMD, AMD Ideen and Beispiele for ideas. This should get you excited about the kinds of things you can do!

Whenever you post something, please include your name and the name of the assignment (e.g. AMD2, Kultur5) as labels. See "Blog: How To" for more details!

These past few days I have had my facebook set to Deutsch. It was definitely very strange in the beginning, trying to adjust to the new words (I used google translate quite a bit). After the first few days i was starting to catch on to the very common words and phrases such as " gefällt das " = like this, and " Schreibe einen Kommentar" = write a comment. I also have gotten much more familiar with smaller, yet still very useful words like "mit" = with, " markiert "= "marked" but is used to express "tag". Over the lat couple of days i haven't had to translate much simply because I had done it so many times before and am just now remembering all of the words i kept having to translate. This little "exercise" was definitely very useful because I, along with a lot of other people, am already familiar with the layout of facebook and its general/common terms, so translating most of it just by using the context wasn't that hard. It also gave me a good look at how some of the grammar is constructed.

AMD 1

For the AMD assignment this week, I changed my facebook page to Duetsch for the day. I don't go on facebook often, but I thought it would be interesting to poke around and see what I could understand. It was very interesting using the translate option as well, there were some sentences that I knew how to structure, and some that I thought I knew how, but a single word threw the entire phrase off. I think I'll leave facebook in this language just for the heck of it, to see how much I learn by April. On a side note, setting the language to "Pirate" is also extremely entertaining.

Skyping with my friend from Berlin

Diese woche ich decided to skype with meine Freundin who komme auf Berlin. Sie ist neunzehn jahre alt. Sie was a foreign exchange student at my high school when I was a junior and wir haben stayed friends. I hope to visit her one day. During our skype talk we spoke in as much German as I possibly could. We talked about school, my classes, her classes, and how much work it is. We also talked about her coming back to the states for a visit. Miriam also introduced me to her schwester. Her sister is a few years older than us, but sie ist nett! Getting to catch up with my friend and actually talk to someone who is fluent in German was a fun and great learning experience. Hopefully the next time we skype I will be able to speak German more German with her.

AMD1 Speaking With A Friend

This week I held a conversation with my girlfriend in German. She took 101 last semester so knew exactly what I was learning and was able to coach me through some of the harder words to learn (die Landkarte, der Bleistift). We were also able to go out with friends, and when the talking began to die down she and I could begin to speak in broken German with each other to our friends amazement. We were able to teach them basic words and phrases, her more than I, (der tisch, Wie hießen Sie?) and then laugh as someone butchered a pronunciation. It was fun to be in such a relaxed situation where it did not matter if you messed up or didnt know exactly how to say something.