Kultur 6

This chapters installment of Kultur learning was once again very interesting. I was not very surprised about the closed door article, in fact it makes a lot of sense to me; why would someone especially at work want to be distracted by everyone that walks buy and all the commotion outside? By removing the stigma of entering a closed door I think distraction is minimized and productivity is maximized, something that Germans would stereotypically be all about. Also, the garbage sorting fell in line with the other aspects of German culture we have learned about, being preoccupied with order and the common good would naturally lead to having serious recycling procedures. I think Germans would find the need to sort garbage twice, similarly to our system, a large waste of time. Finally, I was most surprised about the portion on the German newspaper, or should I say tabloid. It seems like obsessing over whether or not a politician gained a few pounds is not in keeping with the German emphasis on straightforwardness; being ok with telling someone that they gained some weight seems far off from ripping celebrities and politicians with photoshop for the same thing.

AMD 6

For this AMD I started by watching Homer's portion of the Simpsons episode. I was half pleased by how much I could contextually understand and half frustrated by my lack of comprehension. I found this section as interesting/entertaining as I could have seeing as how it was the Simpsons (you may all hate me for it but I don't really like the show). After watching Homers Tag I couldn't stomach any more Simpsons so I decided to do another short activity to complete my AMD. I decided to go to Reddit and check out some of the German subreddits. Reddit is an online community based on links to various other sites, these links range from intelligent political discourse and news sites to lewd humor, the links are sorted by topic matter into subreddits so I went to r/deutschland a subreddit almost completely in German. Once at the site some posts I couldn't decipher but many were English speakers asking in German about visiting and other random questions. Finally I was able to understand a couple of German humor links, one in particular was making a rather inappropriate joke about Angela Merkel.

AMD 4

For AMD 4 I decided to do some research about my German heritage. My parents always told me that I was almost entirely German; my middle name is Keilen (my mothers maiden name) which I have been informed is also a German surname. I started my inquiry about my heritage by searching the immigration records for people with the last name Keilen. I found that most immigrants with this name were from Prussia; Prussia is a region that makes up a large amount of the northern part of Germany. Historically Prussia was a separate kingdom from Germany and was not fully merged until after World War II. I then became very distracted by the history of Prussia and ended up reading a lot more about the topic. In general, Prussians were highly respected in the military world and were a European power especially in the 18th and 19th centuries. Overall, though I was never able to conclusively find out if I am Prussian or not I certainly would feel proud to have that B.A. heritage.

AMD 2

For my second AMD I read the two Mark Twain articles. I found both to be very humorous in Mark Twain's classic style, especially his suggested revisions to the German language in his speech. "The Awful German Language" addressed many of the most confusing aspects of learning German in my opinion, unfortunately the article doesn't provide many strategies for overcoming this confusion. Overall, I was glad to hear that someone as intelligent as Mark Twain had issues learning German because it gives my struggles more validity however, if Mark Twain thought it was hard to learn then that doesn't fill me with very much confidence in my chances. Finally, I do believe I am going to try and avoid German newspapers.

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.