Faz.net

For this chapters AMD I explored www.faz.net; the website for the German newspaper Frankefurter Allemeine Zeitung. I was a little skeptical as to how successful of an activity this would be ie. how much I’d actually be able to understand, but still thought it was worth trying. Once there, I was able to understand enough German to navigate the pages from the “Politik, Sport, Finanzen, Technik und Motor, Wissen, und Reise” tabs and even read a few headlines and phrases from articles. Most of the headlines had components and phrases I recognized but there were few I could read completely. A couple were “Nicht ohne ihn in Berlin”, “Wir sehen uns in Tokio”, and “Mainz singt, Deutschland lacht”. Even though it’s not as if I could sit and read any of the articles, it still was fun to try to pick out sentences or guess the meaning of them. I’d like to try and periodically visit the Frankefurter for practice and to see if I am able to notice my German improving. If anyone’s looking for an AMD activity try this site; it’ll be fun to see/use what you know so far.

AMD 4

For AMD 4 I went on Livemocha.com. I chatted with a few different people and it was very interesting. I learned a few things about the way i was speaking German and how I could improve it. The people that I chatted with were very helpful and nice and really seemed like they were trying to help me.

AMD 4 Die Aristokatzen

I watched The Aristocats auf Deutsch this time around. I stumbled on the German versions on Youtube quite accidentally, and as I had recently seen the movie in Englisch, I figured I would give it a shot. Similarly to the Janosche book we are reading in class, the sentences are simpler, containing ample familiar vocabulary, so comprehending was not difficult. At first I only picked up words like Katze, spazieren, finden, trägt, danke, Entschuldigung, vergessen, nein, Musik, Freund, heute, warum, schwester, verheiratet, wunderbar, etc. Progressing a little farther into the movie, I got some sentences like Kommen Sie hier (Sie command!), Wir haben einen Lift, Wir haben nur Katzen, Wo ich bin, Wo bist du, ganz allein in große Haus, sie sagte oft (narrative verb form!), Was is Frühstuck, Orange Straßekatze, Das ist mein, deine liebe kinder, sie brauchen einen Vater, ich weiß nicht was ist sagen soll.

Many of the above phrases are probably easy for most of us to understand, and with images to help, watching this type of movie in German is not difficult! I think I will try to tackle a non-Disney movie next time as well as one I have not memorized and see how it goes.

As I have sort of implied, watching the movie in German became progressively easier. At first, I think I was trying to catch every word and understand everything. This was much more difficult than sitting back a little and listening to the German and writing down words and phrases I caught. Pretty quickly, especially because I know the movie, I caught the longer phrases that made sense with the images on the screen.

I must say, my favorite part watching this in German was the "Katzen brauchen furchtbar viel Musik" song, which is the first link at the end of this post. In English, the words are "Everybody Wants to Be a Cat". It seems, however, that the German translation or at least the literal translation is "Cats need lots of terrible music." I am not sure if there is some other meaning for furchtbar... it is always interesting how songs translate between languages!

The first link below is a link to the entire movie in German. The second link, as previously mentioned is just one song from the movie.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQri7tM5pDk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDaXf23sQq8