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!

AMD 1

For my fun filled experience in German I watched a German cartoon that had English subtitles. I viewed the cartoon twice using the suggested method of reading the subtitles heavily the first time and trying to listen more the second. The cartoon was a humorous depiction of a soccer game in a market. My main takeaway from this activity was that I am terrible at understanding spoken German. Often it is possible to decipher at least a couple written words in a sentence however, I rarely felt that I understood words when I was trying to avoid looking at the subtitles. Overall, I enjoyed the humorous cartoon especially with subtitles despite my shortcomings when trying to understand just the audio.

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.

AMD 1

For this assignment i decided to change my facebook to German. It was interesting to see all of the things that i read everyday in another language. It also made it a little easier to understand seeing in a more recognizeable setting. I find it easier to learn sometimes in a context that is not reading and memorizing from a textbook.

AMD 1 helped me become a little more with some common German words because I can now associate them with facebook and it may make it a little easier when it comes time to study for a test.

AMD John Borger

For this assignment I decided to change my Facebook into German. This was kind of a cool experience. First of all, I know what a lot of the tabs and such are supposed to say. So when I see them written in German, I can instantly understand how the word is being used. For example : " ist in einer Beziehung mit " must mean is in a relationship with or something along those lines. I knew that because Facebook puts a heart next to relationship changes. In that way it is kinda cool to pick up on new words like that in a real world type of application.

Unfortunately the changing of the settings does not affect what my friends have actually posted. I would have wished for this to have been incorporated into some type of translation software so I could compare my friends mesages both in English and then in German. But I guess that this might yeild some errors and that would be a bad thing to study.

I just liked something by hitting the

button. It is strange to see such a simple concept that requires so many words in another language. 

Overall this was kind of a cool experience and I think that I may even leave my Facebook on German for a while to see if I can get used to it or not.

AMD 1 Ben Lemisch

For AMD eins I, like many other students, set my facebook to German. At first it seemed rather daunting since nothing was in a language I understood but gradually I recognized the layout of the site and gathered my bearing. Having the site in German helps greatly when it comes to learning grammar and vocabulary since I already know many of the words and phrases on the site. Seeing the German words in place of the English ones I know so well makes it possible to learn them faster. For instance, I did not know that the German word for "groups" is "Gruppen" but because I knew what English word should be in that place it made it possible to discern the meaning of "Gruppen". This was my experience while looking at most of the site; learning a new word in place of an old one is easy and comfortable since you have to learn them in order to navigate around the website effectively. It becomes easy after a few minutes to decipher the page into recognizable phrases from class and figure out the rest from context clues which makes navigating around the website easy. This is definitely an easy way to enhance your skills with German and become comfortable with the German language.

AMD 1 - Calen Jones

For die AMD eins, ich gelese die website Bundesliga. Ich gelese Artikels zu ein football Spielen. Das Spiel eins war Kaiserlautern against Mainz. Kaiserlautern won das speil 3:1. Die Artikel war geschrieben about laut Mensch aus the stadium und die Artikel war geschrieben sehr slang und complex Vokabular. Sie ist schwierig zu mir verstehe. Das Spiel war sehr exciting und played at nacht. Er ist fast-paced und affected die Bundesliga standings. Das Spiel war controlled auf die Offensive sides. Die Artikel also mentions other Spielen as well.

Link zu das Speil: http://www.bundesliga.de/de/liga/matches/2011/index.php?bmi=130221&reiter=nachbericht&tag=6

AMD 1

For this assignment, I decided to change my Facebook language to German. I tend to spend way too much time on Facebook while I'm trying to do my homework anyway, so I guess I knocked out two birds with one stone.

One thing that surprised me was how many words remained similar or identical. "Profile" became "Profil." "Photo" became "Foto." "Account" became "Konto."

There were, naturally, a lot of words that were nothing like their English translations. "Wall" became "Pinnwand." "Logout" became "Abmelden."

The cool thing is how much I recognized and understood. I recognized the words for mother, father, and sister. Looking at my album "Mobile Uploads," I noticed that in German, it is "Handy Uploads." That made me giggle.

A friend of mine is an exchange student in Germany this year. She went through two weeks of nothing but German classes. I looked on her profile and tried reading some of the status updates and conversations in German. I was pleasantly surprised at how much I understood.

AMD 1 - Benjamin Oztalay

I wrote a small program to help us all with memorizing the genders of nouns in the Kapitel Eins Wortshatz. It's called "das Genus".

Once you start, it randomly selects a noun from a list and gives you a word. You then have to write the correct Artikel (der, das, die) for das Wort. If Sie sind falsch, it'll tell you the correct Artikel, then let you try the same Wort again to reinforce it. If Sie sind richtig, it'll select a new Wort for you to try.

To get it, klicken Sie heir. It'll download as a ZIP file. Just open it and double click dasGenus.exe to get started!

It was fun to machen this, I've always liked programming. It was interesting to try to program in Deutsch, since many of the words you use have to be in Englisch for der Computer to understand them. I used as much Deutsch as I could, though. Also, putting together the vocabulary list definitely helped me learn some of the words!

Hier ist a screenshot of das Genus:

Ben Oztalay

AMD1 - Was ist Lebkuchen? (Kayla Bialik)

Was ist lebkuchen?
For our first AMD, I decided to research a traditional type of german dish. When traveling in German last summer, the Marienplatz (a central square in Munich/München) had small stands selling what looked like Gingerbread hearts decorated with icing. These are Lebkuchen or Pfefferkuchen. These gingerbread like cookies are a traditional treat during Christmas time invented in the 13th century by monks in Franconia, Germany. Though, another source states that they were originally baked in Nüremburg, where they are best known. There are also regional differences in the cookies.

The large heart shape of the cookie is not the traditional way of making lebkuchen, however. Traditionally they are shaped into circles, rectangles, into a Honigkuchenpferd (a horse shaped cut out). Just as there are large differences in the way these cookies are shaped, they are also made with a variety of different ingredients. Traditionally, they are made with a variety of spices and honey. This gives them the alternative name of "Honey cakes." Another oddity in how they are made is that they are also placed on a thin wafer (called an Oblate) to keep them from sticking when they are being baked.

Wie machen Sie lebkuchen?

After investigating what lebkuchen was, I wanted to know how to make it. Here is the ingredient list (with my best attempt at translations) from the recipe "Annas Elisen - Lebkuchen":
Eier (eggs)

Zucker (sugar)

Marzipan (Marzipan)

Lebkuchengewürz (gingerbread seasoning)

Zitrone(n) (lemon peel)

Zitronat und Orangeat (Candied lemon and orange peel)

Haselnüsse gemahlen (ground hazelnuts)

Mandel, gehackt und gemahlen (almonds, chopped and ground)

Oblaten (wafers)

Kuvetüre, Vollmich und weiß (milk and white chocolate coating)

Mix, bake for 20 minutes, coat, then eat! Definitely planning on making these cookies soon, now that I know what exactly they are. Now I just have to find marzipan and Oblaten....

Kayla Bialik

Reading sources:

http://www.germanfoodguide.com/lebkuchen.cfm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebkuchen

http://www.chefkoch.de/rezepte/480211142005882/Annas-Elisen-Lebkuchen.html

http://www.germanfoods.org/consumer/facts/lebkuchen.cfm