AMD 3 Ben Oztalay

I decided to watch a couple episodes of South Park in German for this AMD. It had less to do with German culture than I suppose I would have liked, but it was interesting nonetheless. Hearing how German sounds from many different speakers in different tones and speeds was cool, and it made me realize that listening to German is a rather difficult thing to do. I kept noticing that whenever I would hear a word or phrase that I recognized, my brain would catch on it and I would automatically stop listening to the rest of what was being said while I translated that word or phrase in my head.

I wasn't really able to understand what was happening in the episodes from the speech alone, but I was able to pick it up from the imagery. I think I have a long way to go before I can actually watch German TV, but I did start to get accustomed to the sound of the language as I kept watching. I noticed that I got better at hearing individual words, instead of a block of syllables, and that I would be able to move on quicker from something I recognized, although that was a very small portion of what was said. After having done this, I think I'll continue watching German TV, like news and other shows, to get more familiar with the language, even though I may not understand what's happening.

AMD 3

For this AMD I decided to watch the German language channel that is on the campus cable. I had noticed the channel while flipping through channels a few weeks ago and decided why not try watching it for AMD? This turned out to be an excellent use of my time.
I tuned in about half way through a cooking program. The host was comparing different types of pizzas and I was surprised at how much I could understand of what he was saying. The host was pretty eccentric and kept pointing to what I can only guess was the sauce to cheese ratio. I think I was right in my assumption as in the end he had ranked the three pizzas and the one (I thought) had the best ratio was crowned best.
After the cooking show was some sort of German comedy show. This little blonde man walked out on to the stage and started telling jokes. He must have been very funny because they kept showing German men laughing so hard they had tears in their eyes. This reminded me of the reading we had to for our last Kultur post, and if I had to guess this show was most likely a take off on the new comedy clubs. While I enjoyed watching grown men reduced to laughing puddles of tears, I must admit most of the jokes shot right over my head.
Of the two shows I watched I enjoyed the cooking one more, mostly because I understood more of what was going on. That being said I will definitely be watching more German TV as I think I learned a lot and it was a pretty good time!

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!