For this assignment I watched the movie "Goodbye Lenin!". In the movie, the main character's mother is a supporter of the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Grermany. She has a heart attack and goes into a coma. Acht months later, when she woke up, the Berlin wall had been destroyed. However, she was still at risk for having another heart attack, so they couldn't tell her anything that might shock her. They had to keep the fact that the Berlin wall had been torn down a secret. It was a very interesting movie and i don't want to give away too much because i definitely recommend watching it for yourself. Here's a trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIjSaHUKD5I

AMD 4

For this week's AMD, I simply tried acting like a German. It sounds drab, but it was actually quite entertaining. Whenever I ate, I only used utensils, like a true German. I also had conversations with mein Vater, who is also learning German. My grandfather is fairly fluent in the language, so I had a short conversation with him on the telephone. Another activity I practiced was whenever I said a simple sentence or phrase, I would do my best to translate it into German in my head. I soon found myself translating my favorite TV shows into German in my head. In my humble opinion, i think it is a great way of learning the language. It also forced me to look up words that I didn't know, or couldn't pronounce. For me, it would weigh on my mind if I couldn't figure out a word, so I would try to figure it out by separation, or by it being a cognate. I definitely brushed up on my German from this activity.

AMD 4: German conversations on Spring Break

Meine Freundin stayed over meine Wohnung für viele Nächte over Spring Break. Wir decided to try to speak Deutsch as viel as possible while wir were together. It helped me realize how important it is to speak Deutsch in order to learn it. It challenged us to think of new ways to combine vocabulary und phrases that wir kennen. As a result, ich denke that wir became quicker with it after a few hours practice.

One good example was when we were talking about mein Vater driving out to pick us up and take us back to our home town (wir kommen aus Redford, Michigan). Sie fragt "Wann kommt deinen Vater?" und ich antworte "Er kommt mit meinen Bruder nach Arbeit, um neun Uhr." I remember this in detail because I was pretty happy to spout off what is probably the longest sentence I've ever said auf Deutsch so far.

Anyway, it was a really good idea und ich denke wir will continue to practice together from now on.

AMD 4

For this AMD I decided to listen to music in German. I did this for an hours. I would listen to the version of the song in English and then I would listen to the German version to see what I could understand. A few times I listened to the German version first and I was surprised to find that I picked up about the same amount of understanding when listening to the German version first. Some of the songs I listened to were covers from artists such as Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift. It is funny hear how they are transposed from different languages. During this activity I also listened to some traditional German music to hear the differences in culture.

AMD 4 - Make love, not Warcraft.

For this AMD Ich watched another south park episode. This episode was called "In der World of Warcraft". Different from last time I watched a south park in Deutsch I understood so much more than last time. I learnt the world "toten" oder to kill. So i picked up on the phrase "Sie Kenny getötet" und "Sie töteten meinen Vater". This episode is about the game called World of Warcraft. The boys start playing the game and then a mystery man attacks and kills there characters. After the boy can't spielen World of Warcraft with out gestorben, they start to give up. How ever Cartmen has the idea of leveling up just killing boars until they are a high enough level to kill the mystery player who killed kept killing them. Before this happen they try to get all the kids in the neighborhood to join forces and kill this online menac. When Clyde says he desn't want to be a part of the group then Cartmen ask,"Sind Sie Französisch Clyde?" After the plan fails they train and kill the man who is terrorizing the web. My favrtive line was "wie wollen Sie töten ohne Leben?" or how do you kill one with no life.

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!