Schneewittchen-- AMD 2

For AMD 2, I had the thought of reading through a little bit of one of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. I chose a classic, Snow White. What could go wrong? Well, not getting the story is a start. After searching high and low on google, I found that it was nearly impossible to find the tale for free in German. I decided to go the the German wiki page and look up the main points of the story. Having known the story previously, it was fairly simple to see where the story was headed. For example, die böse Stiefmutter sagt "Spieglein, Spieglein an der Wand, wer ist die schönste im Land?". Now, that's not an exact translation to the rhyme we're all accustomed to. It's a rough translation though. A couple differences with German fairy tales to conclude my post. From my research, I learned that firstly, German fairy tales often try to intimidate the readers, die Kinder, into doing what either a.) their parents want, or b.) what is socially acceptable to do. Another difference is the fluffy stereotypical fairy tale ending. This rarely happens in German. Most end in the perpetrator meeting their demise. Very rarely are the antagonists coerced into a happy ending, like in American fairy tales.

AMD2, Norman Lam

Ich watched a video on the Deutsche Welle Youtube channel heist “Eurokrise - zahlt Deutschland genug?” twice, once in Deutsch and again in English. Sie ist basically a debate among journalists und scholars whether Deutschland should pay more Geld to stabilize Europe, or whether Deutschland should only pay more when those countries in need have shown more concrete progress on fiscal reforms.

Ich actually found it very hard to catch what sie sagen, aber Ich caught phrases like

“und das ist das Problem für Deutschland", “Disziplin ist sehr gut”, und of course words such as “aber”,“nicht”, “Politik” and “schnell”.

Although the topic is interesting to me, es ist nearly impossible for me to grasp what they are saying as there are no subtitles and they are speaking very fast. I will make sure to find another video with subtitles next time.

Video link for reference:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaudxTMwR_c&feature=plcp&context=C3cad356UDOEgsToPDskLHfAj1S0KWj6ZotejSfVUJ

AMD 2: South Park

For my AMD this Woche ich watched South Park in Deutsch. I watched the Episoden "All About Mormons," und "Cartmanland." Ich picked die Episoden sort of at random aber also because ich have seen them many times and figured ich verstehe most of them. It turned out to be a gut choice because there were a lot of conversations in die Episoden that showed Wortschatz wir learn im Deutschklasse.

Im die ersten Episode ich verstehe Die Familie Wortschatz zum Bespiel "Vater," "Mutter," "Schwester," etc. Im die zweiten, Cartman bought a theme park and had to figure out wie viele people to let in his park and wie viel to charge them. There were a lot of numbers through the episode and it was challenging to keep up with the pace that Deutsch is actually spoken but I did manage. Finally, ich verstehe some common phrases we have learned, zum Bespiel "Was ist das?" "wie Bitte?" und especially commands as well, zum Bespiel "setzen Sie sich" und "schrieben Sie."

The characters sprechen sehr schnell, so it was hard verstehen sometimes. I noticed that when there were larger periods that I understood well, it seemed to slow down, like during the part where somebody was introducing seine Familie. This is probably because ich was able to pick out full phrases and sentences rather than single words. I think I might try to do this again once ich lerne more Deutsch and can verstehe better.

House

This week for my AMD I decided to watch two of my favorite episodes of House in German. It was a lot easier to understand than I though it would be. Part of the reason that it was easy to understand could have been because I have seen both of the episodes in English before. Some of the dialogue was funny because in English House is very short and rude, so being in German, Dr. House sounded even more rude. While watching the episodes I chose to not have on the subtitles because I wanted to see how much I could comprehend without them, and I did pretty well. I think from now on I will try to watch more movies and tv shows in German!

AMD2 - Findet Nemo

For my most recent "adventure with German" i decided to watch "Findet Nemo". It was actually even more interesting to watch it in German than in English. The way they said some things was very funny; especially when coming from certain characters (like Bruce, Crush and Dory). I should have written this blog while i was watching the movie because i would have been able to use much better German vocabulary from the movie that now escapes me. I was definitely able to pick up on some of the grammar that we have learned in class and learned a few new phrases like "Gutes Gefuhl ist weg".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnDf-Wffal4&feature=related

AMD 2- South Park

For my second adventure in German Ich decided to watch an episode of South Park with 2 of mein Fruend. Wir watched the episode "City Sushi" and "It's a Jersey Thing". City Sushi was about zwei sushi restaurants competing for consumers. The Second was about New Jersey expansion cross the country. Die Personen von South Park set up a barricade, und fight die cast of Jersy Shore. Die Personen von South Park hat the help of Osama Bin Laden, und Er totete die Personen von Jersey. Although I couldn't understand most of it I did pick up on some things. I understood all the subjects such as Ich, Du, und Sie. I also noticed a few phrases like "Ich Heisse Stan", und "Wie bitte". One other thing I noticed was the numbers they used zwei, und drei a couple of times.

AMD 2

For AMD 2 my coworkers and I drank beer over lunch and attempted to speak in German while reminiscing about our travels to Germany. Our company does automotive manufacturing quality testing all around the world, and as Germany is a huge automotive supplier so we do quite a bit of business there. The people that I spoke with had spent most of their time in Frankfurt and Dusseldorf, while I spent most of my time in Hamburg and Berlin, so we got to learn a good bit about the respective places. Although none of us were very fluent in German, it was fun to attempt to converse over lunch. It was interesting to learn how densely populated the western part of Germany is, and how much manufacturing is done there.

My favorite story from the afternoon was from a younger employee who arrived in Dusseldorf at a time when all of the hotels were full and was put up in the hotel owner's girlfriend's parent's house. Lucky for him they were nice people and the older woman spoke a good deal of English. On his last day in the "hotel" they even cooked him dinner and gave him a quarter barrel of their home brewed beer, which he had shipped back to America.

I'm looking forward to improving my verbal skills so that I can have experiences like this when I get shipped out to help the Germans improve their automotive manufacturing processes.

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!