AMD 5

I decided to attempt to improve my listening skills with this AMD, so I went to the top 40 list for Germany. http://top40-charts.com/chart.php?cid=12 It amazes me that of the top 40 songs, only 5-6 of them are in German. There was one that appears to be French, but I'm not sure, and the rest are English. I have heard before that many people from other countries know English, and this in a way, proves that. Practically every song on the American Top 40 chart is in English, and most of the people here only know English.

Anyway, I began listening to # 3 on the list, and the song annoyed the crap out of me, so I stopped. I then went onto #8. This turned out to be a very pretty song about holding onto a friend through the hard times. Unfortunately, I couldn't understand myself what was going on in the song. Actually, I understood very few of the words, but thanks to an online translation of the song, I could listen to the song and read the lyrics at the same time. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Om3lPqz750I http://lyricstranslate.com/en/so-wie-du-warst-way-you-were.html

The second song that I listened to is called "Himmel Auf." I is another pretty song. I could understand the first few lines of the song, then she started singing words that we don't know yet. Again, I followed the lyrics of the song while it was playing, and the lyrics are kind of strange. I think it is one of those things that the author wanted to happen, but there seems to be biblical undertones throughout the song. This is not to say that it is a Christian song, but she used the pain endured by Jesus in the Bible to show that pain that the girl in the song is experiencing. Overall, I really liked it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Uddzl2MDE8 http://lyricstranslate.com/en/himmel-auf-when-will-heavens-open.html

AMD 4

For my AMD4 i decided to watch a television show in German. While thinking about the possible shows I could watch I thought of one of my favorite shows, "Law and Order SVU" and decided to look up on youtube if there were any episodes in german. To my surprise I found a bunch of them. I picked and episode I had already seen before so I could have some what of an idea what was going on incase I didn't know alot of the words. First off, it is hilarious watching a American show in German becaues the voices sound nothing like the preson or the expressions. I did have a lot of trouble following the words just because they were talking so fast. I feel like i should have watched a different tv show maybe a more simple one like a childrens show, but it was still a great experience. I can't wait until I get better in German as the years go on so one day I will know all the words the characters in a show like Law and Order are saying.

AMD 4 Ben Brady

I decided to translate a German poem into English. Ich lese gern Gedichte! I translated a poem by Friedrich Rückert called Widmung. It was set to music by Robert Schumann. Ich singe deutsche Lieder oft. I found that I understood a lot of the lyrics before I even looked up the English translation. Ich lerne viel in Deutsch Klasse. German speakers have a whole different repertoire of rhyme schemes than English speakers. For instance, English poets would love be able to rhyme "heart" and "pain," and Germans are lucky enough to have "Herz" and "Schmerz." There are also many grammatical lessons to be taken from translating a poem, particularly this one such as distinguishing between the accusative and the nominative case. "Dass du mich liebst, macht mich mir wert," or "Du hebst mich liebend über mich." What fun!

AMD 4

For AMD 4 I watched an episode of South Park in German. The episode was "Rauf auf's Huhn" ("Chickenlover" in English). I did not see this episode before, so I didn't know what to expect. It was quite difficult intially watching the episode, although I could make out quite a bit of the words and I had a good idea of what was going on in the Episode. While the characters in the show spoke very fast, it was not too hard to understand what words the characters were saying, which was helpful. The episode was about a person molesting chickens throughout South Park, and they boys are made deputies to help stop the "Chickenlover" because the main police officer on the case is illiterate. It was a strange episode, but it was funny and  I enjoyed watching it in German. After I watched it in German, I watched it in English to see if I understood most of the episode, and I did in fact have a good grasp on what the episode was about. Overall, I enjoyed doing this assignment and would recommend anyone else to try it out if they can't think of an idea for one of the next AMDs.
Here is a link to the episode: http://www.southpark.de/alleEpisoden/203

Brandon Small

AMD 4

Over break, my family and I went to Frankenmuth for the day. It is very obvious that Frankenmuth is in no way a true representation of Germany, but it shows German culture circa 1920 better than most other places. While my family was there, we ate lunch at the Bavarian Inn. My meal consisted of a lot of meat, bread, some cheese-stuffed circular things, and saurkraut. I can't stand saurkraut, so I didn't eat it. It reminded me of one of the articles that we read about the meals in Germany. I think it said that Germans believe in high fat and high calorie foods. Well, this meal definitely held up to those standards. In addition, the menu that I ordered from sometimes had the name of the food, and I could identify what a few of them met. There are a few reasons that I think caused me to not identify more. One is that the food I was ordering had complicated names that we don't learn in German 101. Another reason is that the southern dialect of German is different from the rest of the country. Also, the whole back page of the menu consisted of alcoholic drinks which I found very stereotypical of German culture.

After a bit of shopping by my grandma (and painful amounts of boredom for me), we went to a sausage place. At least we thought it was a sausage place. There was sausage, but most of the store consisted of alcohol, mainly beer. There was also German candy, and I bought some of that. Unfortunately, the towns attempt at being German did not stretch to their liquor laws. It was still illegal to sell alcohol to minors.

The rest of my day consisted of eating fudge (Is fudge German? I don't think it is.), and being painfully bored in Bronners. Anyway, I got to eat some good food, buy German candy, and I learned that there are far more types of beer in the world than necessary.

AMD 4

I read Mark Twain's "The Awful German Language." I thought it was really funny because it was so relatable to language learners. What he said about the rule exceptions is so true. I remember in Spanish when we would learn all the irregular verbs and grammar exceptions it seemed like that list was longer than the verbs that were conjugated regularly. I'm sure this is equally frustrating when learning German or any language where you have to conjugate verbs. It will be interesting to learn more of the cases since that whole system is new to me and different from English. Like Twain I'm still confused by the total separation of the verbs and subjects in some cases. It seems like by the time you put in all the rest of the predicate and finally reach the verb at the end, you forget who the original subject was. It was really interesting to read about the gender of the different things, I always wonder how they decided the gender of everything. In Spanish the gender system seems to have a pretty logical order most of the time, but in German when you add in the Neuter it gets really confusing. The example he gave about the turnip and the lady was really interesting. The fact that the turnip is referred to as "her" while the lady is referred to as "it" is really strange. It was also interesting to read about how all of the different body parts all have different genders assigned to them. I wonder how they decided what gender all of the nouns would have. The paragraph about Schlag and Zug was really funny, it's weird to think that one word can mean so many different things. When I was reading I was sort of comparing what he was saying about German to English and I guess I found many of the same things to be true, like how one word can mean multiple things. The part about the compound words really caught my attention because I think this is one of the most distinct parts of German. I don't really understand why they don't put spaces but those huge words are really funny! Overall it was a really funny paper to read and I would recommend it to any language learner; it's so true.

AMD 4

For this AMD I went to my girlfriend's house and had a German breakfast with her German parents and her. We had what I think is a typical German breakfast with a boiled egg, brot, fleisch, and kase. It was delicious and I got a little more insight into their culture. From what I read from the kultur texts, I found to be true. They were very conscious about getting organic and not modified in any way foods. Since they were both cooks in the house they both knew a great deal about the things they cooked, especially the father. He talked about how some of the meat that he had on the table was smoked thin slices of ham that was smoked for half a year! I don't remember what else he told me, like what it was called and etc, because it was kind of turning into a history lecture. While talking about this meat he also said it was a common German dinner to have bread, with sliced meat on it, a slice of cheese, egg (he called it flat egg, but we Americans call it sunny-side up), and tomato on top. I also do not remember what it was called, but he said it was very common in Germany. Overall it was a delicious and learning experience, it's funny how much you can learn around the dining table.

AMD 4

For this AMD, I decided to watch clips of some of my favorite disney movies in German. In high school, we would watch disney movies in my Spanish class and it really helped me learn some new words and feel proud of the words i could pick out from the story that i already knew. I have always thought this was a good way to learn so i thought i would give it a try in German! My first clip was of The Little Mermaid, my favorite disney movie. My first impression was that it was weird. All of the characters had different voices and the phrasing seemed different than how we would say things in English. When part of your world came on, i was surprised that i could actually pick out words i knew such as wunderbar, nicht, schön, viel, doch, tanzen, und fragen. Since i knew the English so well, i think it helped me learn some new things because i found myself saying then English in my head as i listened to the German and going "oh thats how you say that in German!" Another disney movie that i watched a bit of was Aladdin. I was surprised that his voice sounded very close to the actual Aladdin. The only thing i didn't like about this one was that it just didn't sound as good in German. I also watched some of Beauty and the Beast and that was pretty true to the English version i thought. Overall, i think it was really cool to watch some of my favorite disney movies in German. It tested what i know and helped me learn a few new things.