Kultur6

The articles for were interesting. I liked the article about the newspaper the Bild Zeitung. What I like is how the newspaper doesn't promote its own opinion and bashes everyone else. It bashes everyone's opinion. It turns the littlest thing into and international incident. The article on German privacy was short but did have good advice. When in doubt, knock loudly and barge into the room with your head held high. From the text book I discovered that most students in German live in off campus housing since doesn't prove many room. Most students rent apartments near campus. Many university work together to help students study abroad. Because of cooperation such as this, cities have also created partnerships. For example the city of Tübingen has a partnership with the city of Ann Arbor.

AMD 6

For AMD 6 I watched the Simpsons in German. I have watched the Simpsons for a long time and absolutely love the show. Watching them in German is very different that what I am used to. Sometimes, they spoke very, very fast. Other times they spoke at a normal conversational pace that I could somewhat comprehend. Some words I easily picked up were when Homer said, "Ich liebe Bier" and when he says, "Ich bin denn mal Moes." While I didn't understand everything I knew what was going on in the episodes from what I saw, the words I understood, and the fact that I had seen the episodes before. I really like the episode, Trilogie derselben Geschichte (Trilogy of Error) because it has a scene with Lisa running just like Lola did. There was also a scene making fun of students in a French class.

AMD 5

For AMD 5 I watched tv in German. I discovered a great website called www.zdf.de. It has a large variety of shows to watch. Unfortunately, the shows don't have subtitles, untertitles in Deutsch,  in English. However, with the German subtitles on it makes it easier to understand what is going on. On this website, I watch a documentary about Madagascar. I didn't understand most of what was said but I had a good idea of what was going on. Some words new words that I understood were kontinent, insel and forst. I understood these because of their resemblance to their English counterparts. Some new words I learned were Urkontinent = supercontinent, luftschiff = blimp/airship and baum = tree. Overall, this documentary resembled most of the documentaries I've seen. The only difference was it was in German. 

Kultur5

For Kultur 5 I learn that Germans can be rather rude. They will "accidentally" bump or push you on the street or in the train station. Almost none of them will say, "Entschuldigung" unless they really seemed to have hurt you. Most will go on their way as if nothing ever happened. Germans are also less... embarrassed about their sexy shops than Americans. Instead of being on the "bad side" of the city, they are in malls and airports. They feature their product prominently as any other store would. I found that the way Germans flirt is very strange compared to the way Americans flirt. Instead of man walking up to the woman with a cheesy pick up line or some other way of breaking the ice, the will give a woman "the look" and if the woman is interested she will come over and talk to him. All of the power is in the woman's hands. If a man goes over and tries talking to the woman he will seem very forward and scare her way. Finally, Germans have two kinds of friends. One, called Bekannte, is someone you know superficially or a coworker. It is someone you know but not extremely well. The other type, called Freund or Freundin, is a true, best friend. I would say that these people are even closer than that. They are more like brothers or sisters. A Freund is a life long bond with someone.   

AMD 4

For my AMD I watched some reviews of videos games that were subtitled in German. The review that was most interesting to me was for a game called Destiny that will come out next spring. The video showed about 10min of game play. During the game play, the developers are discussing different aspects of the game, all of this is subtitled in German. I was surprised by the number of words I recognized. While I didn't know all of them, I knew enough to understand what was going on, even if they weren't speaking English. Some new words that I learned were: Grenzland which means frontier, übertrieben which means, in the context used, overdone, teufelsläufer means devil walker, and öffentliches which means public. The videos I found were on YouTube and came from a channel called GameCheck · YouTube.com/Spiele. This channel has a lot of video game trailers all in German.

Kultur 4

From the Kultur 4 articles, I learned that Germans love bikes. They ride their bikes everywhere! There are multiple reasons for this. The biggest are that the cost of owning and operating a car is very expensive and it's more environmentally friendly to ride a bike. In addition to riding bikes, Germans like to take trains. Since the country isn't that big, approximately the size of Montana, Germans can use the trains to take a show day trips. The most important thing about taking the train is to have a ticket. Germans rely on the Honor System for this. There is no gate or guard stopping a person from getting on the train. Once aboard, a man will walk around and check for tickets. Germans also have a deep respect for the rules. For example, in American most of us will cross the street when there are no cars coming, even though the sign says not to. In Germany this doesn't happen. They will follow the sign to the letter and use various ways of ""encouraging" others to do the same.

Kultur3

For Kultur 3 I learned a lot about German beer and their attitude toward drinking. The first article described the different types of beer there are. Some are light, with low alcohol content that can be refreshing in the afternoon. Other are very dark and heavy. They have a high chance of, "Waking up in the ditch with a headache." Germans absolutely love their beer and they like to drink it everywhere. It's not uncommon to see a person walking down the street drinking a beer or in the park drinking or even on the train after work. There have been many attempts to ban public drinking. Most have been turned down and the few that were passed were over turn a short while later.

The articles also discussed the German sense of humor. Most people don't think Germans have a sense of humor mainly because the jokes don't translate into other languages very well. Also, the humor is very diverse. There are "regional dialects" of humor. Something that is absolutely hilarious in the north might not be understood in the south.

AMD 2 Heath Ahlers

For AMD 2 I read The Awful German Language by Mark Twain. It was an interesting read to say the least. Mark Twain is completely confused as to how the language works. There is no logic to the way it is set up. For example, there are four cases: Nominative, Genitive, Dative, and Accusative. That means there are four different ways to say something as simple as "to our good friends." What is also confusing is separable verbs. For example, reiste ab means "depart" in German. Imagine if I separated depart in English. "The plane de from the airport this morning parted." Now that sentence didn't make a whole lot of sense in English, but in German that is perfectly acceptable. Another thing that is confusing about the German language is the way they combine words. For example, to say 21 in German is einundzwanzig. Literally translated it means "one and twenty." What's confusing is that there is no dashes or spaces between the individual words, they're all just rolled into one.

Not everything Mark Twain says about the German Language is bad. He likes how the nouns are capitalized. That way it is very easy to pick them out of a sentence.

Kultur2

In Kultur 2, I learned that Germans are very honest and blunt people. They say what they mean and mean what they say. Unlike Americans, Germans don't tell white lies when asked a question. For example, if your friend's grandma make a cake and offers you a piece. An American might lie and say, "No thanks, I'm on a diet." while a German would say, "No, I don't like cake." Germans also have a thing for statistics. They love know the numbers like the elevation of their city, the population size, the size (in square kilometers), and other things like that. It's their way of knowing their city. Finally, Germans like to complain. Because their country does so many things well; like healthcare, public transportation, and cars, they always complain about the little things. They complain about their soccer team not doing well even though they made it to the finals a few years ago. The trains are always late and if the train wasn't late they will complain about the food or the people. While this is exaggerated to a point, I think it would be interesting to live there and find out for myself how much they actually complain. Overall I found these articles very interesting and enjoyed reading them.  

AMD 1

For AMD 1 I changed the language on my Facebook page over to German for and hour. Many of the words were still in English because my friends still wrote in English and the advertisements didn't change. However, when I did start reading the German words on my page I had no idea what they meant. I started looking at where the words were located which tell me what the words meant. For example, I know Gefällt mir means like. Kommentieren means comment. Geburtstage means birthday. While I don't know the meaning of all the words, I have enough experience with Facebook to navigate it in German and understand a decent amount of what I was reading.

Kultur1

How German is American was an interesting read. The booklet explained that lack of German traditions in America was not due to outside pressures. It wasn't WWI or influences that cause German immigrants to neglect their ancestry. What happened was the German immigrants completely integrated with the Americans. Both of the peoples took on aspects of one another and became one. German immigrants gave us the Bratwursts, Frankfurter and, most importantly, beer! Much of this German influence is seen in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, known as the "Most German City in America". German immigrants also influenced the education system with an emphasis on early childhood education and the certification of teachers. Also, up until the mid twentieth century, German was the second most spoken language in America. The reason Germans were able to integrate so easily was the fact that they weren't "rigid" in their beliefs and traditions. That's not to say their beliefs and traditions weren't important to them. But the Germans were able to adopt American views and practices while retaining their values. This idea is show in the quote from Unser Adoptiv-Vaterland, "Mögen deutsche Gründlichkeit, bestandigkeit und Treue ach fernerhin die Kennzeichen des deutschen Elements in den Vereinigten Staaten bleiben und sich dem americanischen Nationalcharacter immer schärfer und bestimmter aufprägen."




This is an example of German influence in Milwaukee.  

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