AMD 2 - Andrew McBride

For this AMD, I decided to peruse the website for ZDF that Mate sent us and watch some news auf Deutsch. First, before watching the news (or Nachrichten) itself, I browsed around the different television options on the site. The first thing that I noticed was that the names of the major categories I already knew or were pretty easy to figure out. These included Film, Kinder, Krimis, Kultur, Politik, Serien, und Wissen. Each was also accompanied by a small representative picture. Even the subcategories were fairly easy to determine with the little Deutsch I know and context clues. Overall, it was interesting to surf around a website and actually have it be a challenge to determine exactly what I was watching and what I was doing.

When it comes to Nachrichten, the first thing that I found interesting was the fact that it's same word the Deutsch Facebook uses for "Messages." In the Nachrichten portion of the website there are a wide variety of different types of news that one can view. I watched some segments on the European debt crisis and on recent developments in Libya. Though I definitely wasn't able to understand most of what was being said, the announcers tended to speak quite clearly so I was able to pick out various words that I either already knew or could decipher based on context clues. Since I already had some knowledge of the different events that I looked at, it wasn't too hard to follow along. One major difference that I noticed between Deutsch news and news here in the U.S. is that the news coming out of Deutschland was far more international. I think this speaks to the different ways in which U.S. citizens and German citizens view themselves and the world around them. U.S. citizens, since they sit at the center of a global empire, tend to have a rather U.S.-centric view of all events, including those that seemingly don't have a U.S. focus; they either bring in a U.S. focus or ignore the events altogether.