Kultur 6

Again, these Kultur texts were incredibly interesting. The one that I found the most fascinating was the article about how they keep their doors closed. It doesn't have to do with being rude; it's just how it is in Germany. I can see how it plays into the "German efficiency." Closing the door lowers the number of distractions, thus allowing you to get more work done. The fact that having doors closed is the norm in Germany is a true testament to how efficient Germany is. I also greatly enjoyed the picture of Dubya next to the article.

As far as the tabloid goes, it doesn't really surprise me. Every culture has their guilty pleasures and their smut. I feel like we get caught up in the "stereotypical German" and laugh.

AMD 6

I was flipping channels one day when I ended up in the foreign language channels. Usually this is the point where I start going backwards, but instead I stopped and listened to them. Then I came across the German channel! I decided to watch it for a while.

I couldn't understand the vast, vast majority of it. When I did end up understanding something, it wasn't a whole sentence; it was a word or two. I heard "nicht," "und," "ich," and other simple words like that. I also heard a lot of past tense words, but I didn't know exactly what they were; I just the "ge" prefix. There was even a (kind of) complete sentence I understood! "Verstehst du? Oder night?" I was very proud of myself.

I wasn't entirely sure what was going on during the show though. It was either a divorce court type show or a soap opera. Or maybe both.

Kultur 5

These kultur are always entertaining, and these were certainly no exception. While reading the article titled "No Blood, No Entschuldigung," I couldn't help but think of the U M buses. People push and shove to be the first people on the bus without muttering any sort of apology. I have yet to see blood drawn in the fight for busses, but hey, I suppose only time will tell. The thing that I found the most interesting out of all of these articles has to be the article about sex shops. Of all the cultural differences we've read about, this is definitely one of the most striking. In America, sex shops are seen as very dirty places and there is a certain amount of judgement people have when they see people going in or going out, at least for the most part. In Germany, however, this is not the case. Sex shops are common place in Germany. I guess this is just kind of a weird thing to think about.

AMD 5

For this AMD, I suppose you could say I took the easy way out. I read the article "Denglisch." The weirdest, or maybe perhaps most interesting part of this article, at least in my opinion, is the chart of words people use in Germany that don't have the same meaning in English, but are still English words. I can imagine Germans coming to America and using their German-English words and our reactions. It would also be kind of funny to see Americans go to Germany and hear these words in a different meaning and context.

And of course, there is the Handy, or cell phone. It was really interesting to read about how this term came to be. It's related to the Walkie-Talkie, called Handie-Talkie. They abbreviated it to be simply Handy.

Kultur 4

Reading the article about pedestrians and cross walks, I couldn't help but think about how different it is from Ann Arbor. I wonder what native Germans would think about how we treat traffic lights. I also wonder how many expletives would be yelled if someone from Ann Arbor were to visit Germany. Hmm...

I love riding my bike, so I was very excited to read how popular bikes are in Germany. Unfortunately my hometown is not very biker-friendly. Maybe I'll visit Germany for the sole purpose of riding my bike around, but I suppose that would be kind of a waste. I'll also have to attempt to cheat the German subway and train system! But seriously, I find that very surprising. I guess it also provides some sick sort of satisfaction to those who avoid getting caught. That's probably not the reason why, but I'm sure it happens.

AMD 4

For this AMD, I decided to dig a little bit into German history. I remembered reading in Vorsprung that the city of Mannheim was heavily attacked during World War II, so I decided to read into why.

Mannheim is located at the meeting of two rivers - the Rhine River and the Neckar River. Cities on rivers are very strategic; Germany wouldn't want to lose it and the Allies wouldn't want Germany to have it. During World War II, Mannheim was an important industrial city for Nazi Germany, further increasing its importance.

We learned in Vorsprung that Mannheim was heavily bombed during WWII, but it didn't tell us the extent of the bombing. Throughout the entire war (1939-1945), Mannheim saw over 150 air raids. It was attacked by both the United States Air Force and the Royal Air Force. They bombed civilian areas as well as factories. The first deliberate "terror bombing" by the Royal Air Force was on Mannheim.

Despite the amount of destruction Mannheim experienced in WWII, it has certainly rebounded, as has the rest of Europe.

AMD 3 - Emily Kaulius

For this AMD, I decided to do what many of you did for the last AMD; I read Mark Twain's "The Awful German Language" and "The Horrors of the German Language." I found "The Awful German Language" to be a unique mixture of hilarious and informative. I was chuckling while learning. Why can't all school be this way? Oh well...

Twain wrote of many of the things I have found to be incredibly frustrating about learning German. One of the first things he wrote about was the genders of nouns. I'm not completely new to this idea; I took French in high school. In French, there are only two genders, unlike German. In French, the genders of nouns actually make some sense. Most nouns that end in an "e" are feminine and those that don't are generally masculine. Simple. In German, as we have come to know, there are few rules with many exceptions.

I greatly enjoyed Twain's "The Horrors of the German Language." I know not every language translated perfectly into another, but I didn't know how hilariously horribly German literally translated into English.

As much as we complain about the German language, we tend to forget about how complicated the English language is. The same word can be pronounced different ways (like the word bow). There are all sorts of irregular verbs. Thank goodness we're not learning English as a second language. That's all I have to say about that.

Kultur 3

Well, Germany is sure shaping to sound like an interesting place.

One of the most interesting things from these articles I thought was how natural Germans' food is. In America, the food business is huge. There are only a few companies that control nearly all of our food in the supermarkets. I do find some of our genetically "enhanced" food quite delicious, but some of it is absolutely gross. I would love to go to Germany and try some "natural food." Speaking of consumables, I also found the article about beer really interesting. I've only tried beer a few times and I found it absolutely repulsive. I honestly don't understand how people can drink so much of it, let alone a single can. Someday I'm going to have to try some German beer, but maybe not Bockbier.

I also quite enjoyed the article about German humor. Like Berliners, I have a very sarcastic sense of humor. I have been known to be slightly offensive. I also enjoyed the part about the Hamburger sense of humor. I'm a sucker for good, witty, ironic humor.

I've decided that I'm going to have to go to a Berlin comedy club and order a meal, topped off with a beer. Who's with me?

AMD 2

I am a huge fan of the musical "Les Miserables." Yes, the title is French (and the entire musical was originally in French), but it has been translated to 21 languages. It is the longest-running musical in the world. I keep going on about the musical itself, but I suppose I should go on to how I related it to this assignment.

For this AMD, I decided to go onto YouTube and listen to recordings of the slower songs in German. I also came across videos in English with German subtitles. I'm not going to lie, the songs that were in German, even though they were slow, were difficult to understand. Heck, they can be hard to understand in English. Knowing the songs in English, I thought of words that I knew in German and listened for them. The song that I understood the most of was "I Dreamed A Dream," which some of you may know as the song that Susan Boyle sang on "Britain's Got Talent." I heard the words jung, Gott, and Traum. I also learned that the word "tiger" is the same in German.

Watching the videos with German subtitles was pretty interesting. I saw words that I knew but didn't hear what we have learned them as. I also heard words I knew in German but didn't see them in the subtitles. It was really cool when I heard something that corresponded with what I was reading, but that didn't happen as often as I would have hoped.

One of the coolest videos I found was from the 10th Anniversary Concert in 1995. It has actors from 17 different countries sing a line from the song "Do You Hear the People Sing?" in their native language. I can't understand anything that's not in English, but it's cool to hear how different languages sound when sung. From watching this video, I learned that Polish should never be sung. Ever.

If you're interested, I put some links to videos below. Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8Qavl8BORk : English with German subtitles

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DsfLQAxiqs : "I Dreamed A Dream" in German

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPpkTgMbhRU : "Do You Hear the People Sing?" in many different languages

Kultur 2 - Emily Kaulius

Well, those were certainly some interesting articles. I have to say, they were much more entertaining than I thought they would be. Between people constantly staring at you, people always complaining, people being very blunt, and all of the different ways to express rage in German, I'm not sure how much fun of a place Germany actually is.

I'm joking. Well....partially.

I will have to give props to Germany for being interested in statistics. As a possible statistics major, I feel like statistics are very under appreciated in America.

I found the fact that the reason Germans are so blunt about things has to do with their efficiency. Germany is known for having fantastic production firms. I worked for Hilite International (an engineering company) over the summer. They have a plant in Germany and I got the chance to read about their production process. I was shocked at how much more stream-lined it was than the one where I worked. My boss has meetings with the Germans all the time. He told me that German is an excellent language to learn if you're going into anything industrial. Chances are you'll be doing business with them at some point.

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.

Kultur 1

I have never blogged before and am not entirely sure how to start, so I'm just going to type and see what happens.

So here we go.

Just reading the title of this article got me thinking. We were all taught in school that America is a "melting pot" of different cultures. I don't know about your educations, but I was never taught in great detail about the cultures that went into the "American culture." Being 3/8 German, this article made me feel slightly guilty for not knowing more about my ancestral culture. I didn't know that "German-American Day" even existed. Shocking as it may seem, I've never heard of Octoberfest. Unlike some of the previous posts, I don't know the stories behind my German ancestry. Now that I think of it, the only story I know is that my great-grandpa came to America from Lithuania about 100 years ago. My last name is Lithuanian for "bones." It's true. You can type it into Google translator.

I'm babbling.

I could, however, identify with the parts of the article about the history of German people in America. I took AP US History last year in high school and now know more about American history than I ever wanted to know. My history class, unlike this article, examined the role of the German immigrants in the American landscape from a very general point of view. It examined the effect the German immigration had on the already-established culture. I found this article interesting because it looked on this same bit of history, but through the eyes of the German immigrants. I feel as though I have I fuller understanding of American history from the time because of this article.