Beispiele (101): Sample AMD Posts

Here are some sample posts that should give you an idea of the range of things you could do with this assignment! Make it fun!

Remember: In 101, your first posts will be mostly in English. Just stick in German words and expressions where you can, however funny it sounds. Gradually you will be able to use more German. The examples below start with ideas for the beginning of the semester, and gradually use more German.

Example 1 (an early 101 AMD ==> English with just a few German words):

Example 2: This is a great idea for learning some simple German early in 101: assuming you're familiar with facebook, you'll be able to learn a lot from setting your facebook language to German for a few days, since you know what the English equivalents are for all the things you're suddenly seeing in German. The sample post below is a bit short, since we don't want to spoil the fun...for a real post, you would want to write down a few more examples of the German you saw, and what you think it means in English. What's the German equivalent of the "Like" button, for example?

Example 3: This next example is very short, but if you watch an entire feature film, it's OK if your blog post is quite short: it just needs to be long enough to convince your instructor that you did really watch the movie. Including a trailer is great for getting your classmates interested. You could also include a few words or expressions you learned from the movie, or mention some cultural similarities or differences you noticed.

Example 4: South Park auf Deutsch. Great opportunity to learn (and post) lots of fun colloquial German! To see South Park in German, go to southparkstudios.com/full-episodes, choose an episode, click on the icon that looks like a weird mouth in the vertical list of icons to the right of the player, and select "Deutsch." Then mouse over the bottom of the screen and click on the "CC" icon that appears, which will give you English subtitles to help you follow along.

Examples 5 and 6: Note that by itself, each of the following two posts is too short. You should spend about 45-55 minutes on the activity that you "do" for your AMD, and then 5 to 15 minutes on your blog post. So if you post about a single YouTube video, which doesn't take long to watch, you should watch it a couple of times, and then spend some extra time writing about what you could understand from the lyrics, and whatever else was interesting about it. Alternatively, you could watch and post several videos by the same artist/band and then just write something short about each one of them. The two posts combined together into one would make one good post.

Example 7: Reading a book in German. This is a great choice for an AMD: you'll have fun and learn a lot. For 101, this will probably be too hard until the end of the course, but if you do this for your last AMD, then you could continue reading the same book for your 102 AMDs, and maybe even into 231. There's also a recommended book at the bookstores, Prinzessin Horst, that's easy to read even at the 101 level - you could try reading the first one for AMD 4, and the second one for AMD 5. If you're reading a German book, your blog post can consist of a very brief summary of what you read, plus some vocabulary you learned while reading, or expressions/quotes you liked.