AMD1 Inglorious Basterds!

Although I *did* change my facebook profile to German as a way to immerse myself into the language in places other than class, that’s not what I’m going to write about.
For this post, I watched Inglorious Basterds, a Quentin Tarantino film about a group of Jewish-American soldiers that go behind enemy lines in Nazi occupied France. It’s an action-thriller style movie spoken in a mixture of English and German with some French and Italian, depending on what would have been appropriate for the situation.
The first reason I chose to watch this movie was that I really enjoy it. It’s fun to watch, the characters, particularly the antagonist, are very well developed and portrayed, and it’s about history…kind of. It’s historical fiction, so it isn’t based on a true story, and it also invokes poetic license with respect to what actually happened. This doesn’t really detract from the entertainment value, though. It’s also pretty graphic, as Tarantino films tend to be, mostly with respect to violence. (Hence why I’m going to avoid putting up a trailer for now. It’d probably be alright, since it was played in theaters, but better safe than sorry…It’s not very hard to find on youtube if you try, trust me)
So how does this fit the assignment? Well, I watched the parts in German as the movie portrays them, with English subtitles, and read the subtitles. It’s been a while since I’ve seen the movie, so I didn’t remember most of the dialogue. Then, I went back and listened without subtitles, to see what I could pick out. What did I observe? I still have a long ways to go, in terms of oral comprehension. It’s one thing to read a sentence in a book, or listen to a slow, deliberate sentence uttered by Mate or another student and comprehend it; it is another thing altogether to listen to complex dialogues spoken by people comfortable with German on both sides. That being said, it wasn’t all a bad experience.
I was able to pick out certain things in the dialogue. Forms of “be,” nicht, kein, the occasional color, greetings, and farewells were partially understandable. In the opening scene, there is a point at which Col. Landa (the antagonist) asks a French farmer, in German, a series of short questions (I’ll avoid spoilers as to what they’re about), to which the farmer replies “Ja” to all. I actually understood a good portion of these shorter, more slowly stated, phrases.
I want to be able to watch the parts of the movie in German without subtitles at some point; that’d be really cool. Hopefully it gets easier as the year goes on, and I’m looking forward to learning more.