AMD 6

It was very hard to understand what they were saying. I could get small bits and pieces but they talk so fast. I could understand what was happening but what they were saying was beyond me. Some phrases and words if they said them slowly I could understand like when Homer says, Ich liebe Bier, and helfe! I wish there were German TV shows that had English subtitles. As I learned Japanese I also watched a lot of anime so I was exposed to the language a lot and could pick up some things. I could understand somethings before the subtitles were fully there. Watching this also made me wonder about German culture and what Germans like to watch on TV. Lola Rennt was kind of dark and it didn't have much humor in it. There were some gruesome pictures. I wonder if a lot of German media is like that too. In Oh, Wie schön ist Panama there was a little rabbit in one of the pictures peeing on a bush. In America you would never see that in a children's book. Also in the K-Fee commercial it was kind of scary. Is that just how German media is? It makes me very curious to what their media is like.

AMD 5

This "Denglish" phenomenon is probably not a new one and something that has been happening since the beginning of language and people of different cultures intermingling. It is probably just more pronounced because the world is quickly getting smaller with the advancement of technology and transportation so there is more and more mixing.
In highschool I took Japanese and I found that Japanese borrows a lot of words from other languages, they even have a different alphabet called katakana for representing words of a different language. One of the words that they took from German is arbeitet, which is the word for work. In Japanese, that's the word for a job.
But not only does German take English words, English in many ways comes from German. I do believe that German did come first chronologically and while taking German, some English and German words are very similar to each other where you could see that this is where the English word came from (probably, I'm not an expert in the history of language). Some examples might be "soll" and "should" and "muss" and "must" and "bier" and "beer" and "Marktplatz" and "market place."  There are many, many, examples of these similarities in phonetic characteristics of the words being almost the same, although the spellings might be different, but this is to be expected because the written representation of words came after the spoken word.
Also to explain this phenomenon with new technology there must be new words for defining these terms that didn't exist before. One of the examples the article used is the term "download" from Bill Gates Microsoft, that Germans now frequently use in their language. So I think that if a Russian had invented the word for "download" or some other country had done something similar and invented a word we would use that word if it was a big enough advancement in technology or if it didn't have an English translation, something that is completely new, and this article might instead be called Reutsch.

Kultur 4

When I went to Germany I did notice that there were a lot of rent a bike areas and I was very tempted to rent one, but we only stayed in each city for about a day so it was kind of pointless and I didn’t really know how it worked. But I did not notice the bike lanes, nor did I get rung at or yelled at. I don’t really remember what I did for pedestrian lights but I usually just follow what the crowd is doing. But the subways I do remember. I kept thinking to myself, why don’t I just get on without a ticket. Of course my mom and I got a ticket, but we were never told to show our ticket. That is probably the most interesting thing about Germany. We had so much trouble just figuring out the machines for the train stations. I don’t think there were many people to ask either. Actually I remember this one lady who helped us to get to where we were going. I guess she knew we were tourists. About naked people though, we were told about the naked gardens, I think in Berlin, but I didn’t see any naked people at all. So I think things must be changing and people are not so open about their bodies now, and I mean, I did go in Summer, so it wasn’t that cold. I guess I wasn’t looking hard enough.

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.

Kulture 2

Kapitel 2

Those articles were quite hilarious to read about. The way it was written was funny. Oddly enough though, when I went to Deutschland last summer I didn’t really experience any of those things, or rather I didn’t notice. I didn't have anyone stare at me uncomfortably or anything. I didn't hear a lot of complaints. Maybe it was because I was protected from the culture by going on a Trafalgar Tour. Next time, for sure, I will go on my own, hopefully with my girlfriend. Sie Eltern are both Deutsch, so I told her to show them. Should be funny. I don’t really notice these things from them either, except for the fact that she likes to watch documentaries, which I started laughing about as soon as I read it. These were fun articles to read, I hope to learn more about the quirky Deutsch kultur.

Kultur1

Daniel Won

When I thought about how cultures are submerged into the title “American”, I thought about how everybody, eventually, if they live here, will be submerged. From my background, my parents speak Taiwanese, and their parents speak Taiwanese, and now they have passed down to me, but in the future, I know I am not going to pass down Taiwanese to my children. I do not know it will enough to speak it well myself much less teach it to further generations. But knowing the inevitable, does it make it a terrible thing? Is it bad that I have not passed down true Taiwanese heritage to my children, only the genes to look like one? Should I make extra effort to keep my pride as a Taiwanese person, to be distinct? And if I should, why? It is kind of a puzzling question when you think about it. Because even if I am no longer, culturally, Taiwanese, now American, there will still be other people who immigrate from Taiwan to make influence on American culture, to put their perspective into the picture. But then eventually, their children, and their children’s children like me, will lose their “Taiwanese-ness”. Though America is known as the most diverse in culture on the face of the earth, is it also a black hole for culture? Does America, suck the culture out of all the people who immigrate here, to make them “American”? This seems to me like a problem, but the same would happen if I went to live somewhere else and have my children there. Maybe not my children necessarily would be French or Italian, but maybe their children, if they chose to stay there, would be French or Italian. Like me, my children would be the “transition generation” into a new country and so a new culture as well. So maybe in conclusion it would be ridiculous to think as America as a “black hole for culture”, as any country could be a black hole for culture. And so when we think about German culture being “submerged” into American culture, it is not such a bad thing, only the normal course of events.