AMD 3 Leah Mattfield

For this AMD, I watched "Nowhere In Africa". It was a wonderful film about a Jewish family that goes to Africa to escape the Jews. It showed their cultural struggles and relationship struggles. I was actually really moved by this film and might have to watch it again some day. it was about 2 hours and 15 minutes. I was able to pick out a little German here and there but definitely spent a lot of time reading the subtitles.

AMD 3

For the past month or so, I've had my Facebook and my phone in German. I thought this would be helpful, but it turned out to be pretty irrelevant. I know the AMD things are supposed to be good, but this one was bad for me. I ended up not using Facebook too much, and when I did, I knew where all the links and buttons were so that I never really read any of the German. With my phone, I use it quite a bit, but similarly, I knew where all the buttons were. And with my phone, the texting app and the internet browser were both still in English, so I ended up not even seeing much German. I was disappointed with this AMD and next time I'll do something more engaging.

AMD 3 - Philip Picon

Since I was very hungry when starting this AMD and because I had a lot of cooking ingredients in my house, I decided to cook a German dish while also reading the recipe in German. The meal that I chose to cook is Würzfleisch. From what I read the term Würzfleisch means "spiced meat" in English and can pertain to chicken, pork, beef, etc. I chose to cook with chicken. To be honest, I did translate everything including the ingredients and how to cook it, but I was unable to understand most of the cooking directions so I cheated on some of the steps and translated them to English for fear of burning down my entire house. The meal came out pretty horribly, however, I would credit that to my horrible cooking ability not because Würzfleisch is a bad dish. While looking at the ingredients, I was able to identify a lot of the words. Here were the ones I knew: wasser, karotte, butter, fleisch, salz, kruste, and zitron. Overall, my German cooking experience was pretty horrible but I blame that on me not adding salt and cooking for the whole time and not on Würzfleisch.

AMD 3

For this AMD, I watched German music videos. I can't really tell what they're saying but reading the lyrics along with the song really helps. One of the videos I watched was "Durch Den Monsun" by Tokio Hotel. I watched this because I had heard of them a couple of years ago. I didn't know they were German! I remember them getting pretty big here. It's interesting to think about because so many American bands are popular in the rest of the world, but it's usually not the other way around. Here's a link to the video if anyone is interesting in checking it out: http://www.goethe.de/ins/us/saf/prj/sig/mus/mcv/en7101218.htm

AMD 3

     For my AMD 3 assignment, I chose to watch Titanic for an hour auf Deutsch. I have to admit it was a little challenging to get what they were saying, but I got the gist of what was going on as I've seen the movie a few times. In the part I watched, I recognized some terms, and learned some new words and phrases. I chose to watch this movie in German because this is my favorite movie, and I wanted to watch it in another language.
     Among the terms that were familiar are the following:
         Entschuldigung- Excuse me
         Sechtzig- 60
         Oh, vergiss es mein Freund.- Oh, forget it my friend.
         Komm Sie- Come here.
         Ich fliege!- I'm flying!
     Some new words/phrases I learned:
         Einsundzwanzig Knoten, Sir!- 21 knots, sir!
         Ich bin der König of der Welt!- I'm the king of the world!
         Geben Sie Ihre Hand- Give me your hand
         Unfall-accident

     

AMD3

I decided to just write sentences to practice for the upcoming test. I thought this would be a good way to kill two birds with one stone. And I thought I would make it a fairy tale to make it more interesting.

Einmal auf ein Zeit, war da ein schöner Prinzessin. Sie ist achtzehn Jahre alt. Sie heißt Sarah. Sie hat blaue Augen und braune Haare. Sie liebt Essen essen. Sie isst Äpfel und Bananen und Trauben von die Obstkategorie. Sie isst gern Suppe, Hähnchen, und Nachspeise. Ihre Lieblingsnachspeise ist Eis. Die Prinzessin hat Zeit für Freizeitaktivität. Sie besucht ihre Großeltern und fährt ihr Rad. Sie singt und tanzt gern. Sie kauet keinen Kaugummi. Die Prinzessin wandert um die Stadt. Sie liest gern in die Bibliothek. Sie siehst gern die Bilder at die Kunsthalle. Sie schwimmt mit die Meerfrau. Sie trägt schöner Kleider denn sie ist eine Prinzessin. Aber trägt die Prinzessin Shorts und Turnschuhe auch. Sie liebt eine Prinzessin sein. Das Ende.

AMD #3

For my third AMD, I watched a South Park episode in Deutsch. At first, I wanted to try to watch and listen to the episode without the English captions. I could catch a few words here and there such as "kein" and "aber" and some question phrases, but most of the time, the voices were speaking extremely fast. So, of course, I switched to using the closed captions. The episode I watched was "Lil' Crime Stoppers". There were some German words that sounded really similar to English like "okay" but that might be  universal phrase to use. Also, the word "doch" was used somewhere in the episode which somewhat helped me better understand the meaning and usage of it. I remember going over that word in class, but it was really confusing to really know when or in what context to say it. I feel "doch" is used when you really want to contradict what someone said or asked. Even if there is no exact English translation, I feel that it's important to learn these kinds of things because they are unique to the German language. It would be nice to respect and appreciate that. And of course, I enjoyed laughs while watching it because not only was it in German(which was fun to listen to) but South Park was being ridiculous as usual.

AMD 3- Amanda Knop

I saw that a lot of people switched their Facebook language to German for previous AMD's. I thought it would be interesting to experience Twitter in German too.

I was actually surprised at how easily I could navigate twitter in German. The home page is called "startseite" which literally means "start page". To connect, you click the button that says "@Verbinden".To view your profile you click on a link that says "Mein Profil ansehen". To write a tweet you click on a link that says "Verfasse einen neuen Tweet". Using my knowledge of the twitter website, as well as my knowledge of German, it was pretty easy for me to translate what these sentences meant.

To reply you click "Antworten", which means answer. This is a little different from the English twitter website. To learn more about the company you click "Über uns", which means about us. A lot of people use the word Über in English to mean very. In German, however, it actually means about.

Overall, I did not find it that difficult to navigate Twitter in German. I thought it was very interesting how much of it I could understand. Most of the translations were pretty similar to the English version of Twitter. Because I can understand it, I think I am going to keep my Twitter in German.

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!