You should listen to this man.
Thirty-three weeks. Thirty-three weeks! I would say I’m surprised by how fast it’s gone, but that would be an understatement. Because I’ve actually been in Germany for forty-three weeks. (Incidentally, long enough to mistakenly type “fourty” before correcting it to read “forty”.) I’m simply ten weeks behind in uploading episodes. I’ll try to be all caught up before I leave this country in July, but until then bitte ich euch um etwas Geduld, and thanks for watching!
Week 33′s episode is another in the series of Roche & Böhmermann-related material. Bonus features, if you will. If you’ve ever wondered just who is that dashing man who introduces every guest on R&B, well, here’s your chance to see him with his tie off. William Cohn proved to be just as loquacious in person as he is on TV. He verbosely encourages me on my quest to learn German, and he tells a pretty hilarious joke. I’m glad he took time out of his busy schedule to sit down with me. Now I just need to figure out how to make my voice as deep as his. Enjoy!
0:41 – His gratitude renders me speechless.
0:52 – I was trying to use a noun meaning “thanks”, but instead I said Gedank, which means “thought”. My dictionary is telling me that the word Dank can mean “thank”. But I’ve never heard it. This was a weird thing to attempt to say anyway…
0:59 – I stutter a lot in this episode. Get used to it! The pains of article agreement. What can I say, I was starstruck!
1:01 - During the whole video I say Aussprach when I meant to say Aussprache, meaning “pronunciation”.
1:12 – I’m misplacing verbs like nobody’s business. I apologize!
1:42 – Not sure where he’s getting these numbers… Which 500 million people does he think should learn English? Europe? Maybe this “schöner Spruch” is a little dated…
1:56 – This is my favorite part. I was struggling so hard to understand what he was saying… I just understood from the cadence of his voice that he was telling a joke…
2:02 – …and then I thought he was just telling me what the word “bilingual” means…
2:08 – …and then I try to defend myself for thinking it was a joke…
2:19 – …and then it hits me! It was a joke the whole time!
2:21 – Classic!
2:50 – I think I would like to hear myself talk if I was him.
2:52 – Who’s Henry Higgins?
3:09 – I believe the look on my face here is the blankest stare recorded in Lernen to Talk Show history.
3:21 – We’ll see about that!
3:55 – This is something I’ve often wondered about. I personally believe that correct pronunciation both the most important and most undervalued aspect of language learning. But even so, pronouncing a word technically correctly doesn’t necessarily mean it is being pronounced completely devoid of nuance of whatever mother tongue the speaker has. But I digress. Perhaps in a later post…
4:43 – My goal? What is my goal? I think my goal is simply to always be improving. I have accepted that my German won’t ever be perfect. How could it? Why should it? But as long as I’m always learning, that’s all I can really strive for.
4:57 - Würfel is German for “dice”. And würfeln is a verb specifically reserved for dice, meaning “roll” (See that “n” at the end?). But of course in this video I again mispronounce the words that I’m trying to explain that I once mispronounced. So what you see here is what I would call a second order mistake. Mistakenly recounting a story about a mistake. Bear with me, folks.
5:07 – My point is, “ü”s are hard to pronounce. And German kids don’t realize this, and they don’t cut you any slack.
6:16 - 6:16!
6:30 – Just in case you didn’t listen to my suggestion two episodes ago. Here’s a link again!
6:43 – Should’ve said, “Es hat mich gefreut…”
The Lernen to Talk Show: Episode 32 – Andi?
For today’s episode, I step into the sound studio for a chat with BTF’s one and only “Andi”! He puts the “Ton” in Bildundtonfabrik. And he was kind enough to talk to me about his poppin’ skills and musical aspirations. Join us as we discuss the ins and outs of modern recording techniques! I’m pretty happy with this episode, because I managed to speak more relaxed than normal.
Thanks to Moritz for filming!
0:30 – “Mickey altes Haus!” literally means “Mickey old house!” which in German means something like “dude”.
0:32 – I thought that he had said “Mickey an das Haus”, which would be an incorrect way of saying “Mickey in the house.”
0:51 – This was filmed early on in my internship, and since then the real Andi has indeed taught me some stuff!
2:23 – sich austoben is a nifty verb meaning, approximately, “to let off steam”.
2:27 – I didn’t know what Fruity Loops was. In case you’re wondering, this is what it is.
2:36 - Here I use the word jemals incorrectly. Jemals is a word that you use do things like ask questions about the past, as in “have you ever…?” I attempted to use it here about the future, to catastrophic results. “Vielleicht werde ich es jemals versuchen” is actually wrong on even more levels than just that. A better way to say it would be, Vielleicht werde ich es eines Tages probieren.
2:54 – I haven’t spent enough time talking about the word “doch” here. It’s a most flexible word, approximately meaning “au contraire”. But it also can be used capriciously to add emphasis to whatever you’re saying. Here it is used to handily express the sentiment, “no you’re wrong I said do it!”
3:06 – This was a rather baffling exchange. Maybe insurance works differently here from how it works in the U.S.?
3:22 – But he just said…
3:31 – There it is!
3:51 – Germany’s best.
4:06 – Actually only http://duktusbeats.de/. Andi was a little confused I think.
Notes on my Wahl-O-Mat Results
Well, the big Nordrhein-Westfalen election on Sunday came and went. The biggest news was that the CDU had a weaker showing than usual, losing seats to the socialist SDPs. Sadly my dear Familien Partei didn’t win any seats, having received only 0.4% of the vote.
Chin up, family!
My last post was a little misleading, as I was under the impression that the whole of Germany was voting in regional elections on Sunday. That wasn’t in fact the case. The Wahl-O-Mat was only up and running for NRW. But as this is Germany’s most populous Bundesland, the results of this election did grab the attention of the country at large.
Here’s a few observations about my Wahl-O-Mat results:
That graph I posted corresponds with point values for each of the yellow bars. My agreement with the Familienpartei was quantified as 53 out of 76 points, or 70%. My agreement with the NPD (the neo-Nazis) was put at 32 out of 76 points, or 42%. Both of these numbers are surprising, in different ways. Considering the vast spread of different political parties in Germany, I had expected that at least one of them would cater to me on “the issues” at a level higher than 70%. And considering that neo-Nazis are presumably all terrible people who I feel should only be allowed to have an opinion because not doing so would mean being more like them, I would have hoped for a lower number than 42% to describe my agreement with them.
As a pretty standard politically disillusioned American, I came to Germany excited to see how its multi-party system catered to the beliefs of a diverse population. I thought our two-party system was fundamentally inferior to one where more people could be more accurately represented more competing parties. Surely here I would find a party that aligned with my beliefs more thoroughly than the Democrats or Republicans. But according to the Wahl-O-Mat, the SDP is the party with seats in the Bundestag who I align with the most, and I only 53% agree with them! That’s not much at all! Could it be that enabling access to the U.S. Government to more parties is not the panacea I thought it would be?
So yes, I walk away from the Wahl-O-Mat more confused than I was before I asked for its wisdom, albeit for different reasons.
NOTE ON WHY THE WAHL-O-MAT MAY NOT BE TRUSTWORTHY: I read into the Familien Partei, and the first thing written in their platform synopsis was that children should have a vote in regional elections. I disagreed with that item on the Wahl-O-Mat, but it still put the Familien Partei on top! Suspicious!
Der Roche & Böhmermann Effekt
As I mentioned a few episodes ago, I’ve been working since February at the greatest production company of all time, BTF. After discovering The Lernen to Talk Show, they entered into a frenzied bidding war with countless other studios around Germany, desperate for my creative input with a new (real) talk show they were producing called Roche & Böhmermann*. In the end BTF prevailed, and I relocated to Cologne as their newest Praktikant. I was quickly put to work researching guests for the show, editing photos for the intro clips, and, as you can see in this video, painting floors. It was exciting to be a part of such a huge undertaking, and having seen the final result, I am proud to have it be my first television credit.
Roche & Böhmermann has turned out to be a smash hit on its humble network ZDF.kultur. You can watch a full episode here on the ZDFmediathek! Originally conceived as a “talk show for people who don’t like talk shows,” I was first attracted to it for its retro look and beautiful image quality. When I first saw the pilot, I did not realize right away that I was watching a TV show. It looked more like a movie about a talk show, with its shots of the cameramen and classic feel. That was last October. It wasn’t until my German had improved a little more that I re-watched the pilot and realized that the discussion was hilariously casual and surprisingly crass. The response has been polarizing. We’ve received a ton of positive feedback (in the form of ratings and otherwise), but also a fair amount of criticism from appalled viewers. I guess some people aren’t ready for a TV show that is actually interesting. It truly is a show unlike any other I’ve seen, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we see some cheap imitation of it pop up in the U.S. next year.
Working on the show has been an amazing help for my German, as I got a chance to meet plenty of new people and do actual work in the language. Having added pressure like that always helps when it comes to language learning, and having it here came with the added bonus that I now know a shocking amount about German celebrities. It’s probably fair to say that I am now better informed about German pop culture than American pop culture at the moment.
Another added bonus was that I was able to film the most meta episode of the Lernen to Talk Show yet! Episode 31 is the first episode to be filmed on the set of a different talk show. Granted, it would be more interesting to have filmed the episode during an episode of R&B, but this will have to do. Join me and Frederic (and plenty other drop-in guests) as we discuss the trials and tribulations of installing a black floor on top of another black floor and much more! I’ll be the first to acknowledge that this episode is a bit chaotic, but I think it also effectively captures the ambience of the studio the night before the first episode was filmed. As a matter of fact, that episode is the one that I link to above, so check it out!
*Embellished for dramatic effect.
0:37 – It’s hard to be bossy in broken German.
0:42 – Amateur mistake… “Jetzt müssen wir streichen” would have been correct.
0:47 – Also grammatically wrong, but understandable. Even though people would understand that sentence, it’s still terribly frustrating to know that I’m not saying it correctly.
0:56 – It would take forever to address every mistake in this episode, so I think I’ll just generalize my mistakes by saying that I attempted to say a lot of complex things, and it ended up making me look a little stupid. I was also pretty tired that night.
2:37 - Sprichwort is the word I was looking for, meaning “proverb”. Instead I say “Dichtwort”, which would mean “thick word”.
2:43 – Not the Sprichwort I was looking for, but better not to argue.
3:12 – It’s actually seven microphones for five guests and two hosts.
4:01 – Here I say “Morgen um halb fünf Uhr”, which is a repetitive way of saying 4:30 (I didn’t need to say “Uhr”). It literally translates to “tomorrow at half five hour”, or “4:30 o’clock”.
4:04 – This is what happens when you parrot something back without understanding the grammar. Patrick had told me that “come to life” is translated as “zum Leben erweckt wird”. My ears heard that as “zum Leben erweckwird,” when in fact he was just using future tense, hence the “wird”. Then I sort of flipped the grammar around, keeping the “wird” at the end when it should actually be at the front of the sentence. You’ll notice that I actually do correctly say “wird” at the beginning of the sentence, but then because I misunderstood what Patrick said I say “wird” again at the end. What a weird mistake!
4:12 – Sometimes opposites work differently in German. Then again, that turn of phrase wouldn’t have worked in English either. But still, no matter how stupid I look I will continue to try to play with the German language. I think that’s the best way to learn, and I encourage everybody else to do it too.
4:35 – … zugeschaut habt! HABT!
4:40 – Sorry Frederic! We have to do another episode!
Wahl-O-Mat!
Germany is caught in the midst of election fever! Posters have sprung up in the last few weeks all over town, sporting the smiling faces of politicians with catchy slogans underneath them. I have ridden by them every day on my bike, happily oblivious of what these people stood for, pleasantly reminded of election season at home when people would stick signs for local politicians in their front lawns so that I could hurdle over them on my way to school. But that happy oblivion is long gone, for tonight my political inclinations have been set straight by German technology! That’s right, scientists in a lab have developed a device that will take your answers to simple questions and return to you a full report on your political beliefs. I am speaking, of course, of the Wahl-O-Mat!
While I won’t have the pleasure of joining my German comrades in voting this Sunday, I still wanted to see which party I might hypothetically vote for were I fully educated on the matter and fully a citizen of this country. Here in Germany it’s not a simple question of Democrats vs. Republicans. There are in fact six different political parties represented in the German Bundestag (Parliament)! How Germans managed to choose their party allegiances before the Wahl-O-Mat was invented in 2002 I’ll never know.
So I tried my luck at the Wahl-O-Mat to see where I stand. Below you can read along with my selections to each agree/disagree/neutral question. ACHTUNG: I just did this for fun. While I did take the answers seriously, I still only spent a few minutes thinking about the answer to each one. Some of the questions involved specific references to German laws I didn’t really know anything about… so I’m pretty sure my opinion of a lot of these issues would change if I just new more about them.
I tried to force myself to side with agree or disagree (and not pick neutral) just to keep things interesting. Also, the exclamation points were all there in the questions. I like the Wahl-O-Mat.
1. An all-out no exemptions smoking ban in all restaurants in Nordrhein-Westfalen (NRW)! (disagree)
2. Gymnasium should stay as the long-term school format. (neutral)
3. All regions of NRW should have a “social ticket” system for the trains and buses .(agree)
4. Fewer “open for business” Sundays in NRW! (disagree)
5. The debt limit should be written into the NRW constitution. (neutral)
6. Autobahn speed limit in NRW! (disagree)
7. The country should encourage more culture projects from immigrants. (agree)
8. There should be referendums/petitions on finance issues also (don’t fully understand… are petitions currently limited? Better go with neutral here.)
9. Recipients of Hartz-IV benefits should have their benefits reduced when they reject job offers. (agree)
10. NRW schools should offer Islamic religion classes in German. (agree)
11. Members of the state parliament should continue to be allowed to sit in on supervisory meetings of the WDR (a big news station). (agree?)
12. The country should work to ensure that all students can receive financial aid regardless of the income of their parents. (agree)
13. No new large mosques should be built in NRW. (disagree)
14. Basic municipal services (gas, water, electricity, waste) should be completely publicly owned. (agree)
15. The marriage between a man and woman should continue to be associated with more rights than same-sex civil unions. (disagree)
16. For major deployments, all police officers should be required to carry an ID (agree).
17. NRW should allow the growth of genetically altered plants. (agree)
18. The country should provide all teaching materials and textbooks to schoolchildren for free. (agree)
19. NRW should ban the National Democratic Party (neo-Nazi party). (disagree)
20. The Real Estate Transfer Tax should be reduced (agree).
21. NRW should make the last year of kindergarten before primary school a requirement. (agree)
22. More people with immigrant backgrounds should work in the police force. (agree) According to the Berlin-Institut für Bevölkerung und Entwicklung, “Only about three percent [of young people with a migration background] work in a public school as a teacher, are police officers or are employed in the registry office. In no other country were the proportions lower.” For a country with one of the highest immigration rates world wide, this number should probably be higher.
23. The doctor’s office consultation fee should be abolished (disagree). I’m all for free health care, but I think there needs to be something to keep people from just going to the doctor with any complaint at all…
24. The state should do more to protect copyrights online. (disagree)
25. Child benefits should just be given to German families. (disagree) I don’t know if I understood this properly, but it seems to be saying that ethnic families should not get the benefits that “native” German families receive.
26. NRW should buy information about tax crimes, even when that data has been stolen (neutral) I do not understand this…
27. There should be a quota for women present on company boards of directors. (disagree) I agree there should be more women in high corporate positions, but I don’t agree the government should enforce a law about it…
28. Businesses should be allowed to continue to donate to political parties. (disagree)
29. Municipal suffrage for all permanently residing in North Rhine-Westphaliaforeigners! (agree)
30. The solidarity surcharge should also be used for structurally weak regions in North Rhine-Westphalia. (agree)
31. All schoolchildren with handicaps should be taught in mainstream schools (agree).
32. The country’s constitutional protection should be abolished (disagree). I may not have fully understood this… but constitutional protection sounds like something I want.
33. Parents who educate their children entirely at home, should receive financial support (“Betreuungsgeld”). (agree) as long as the rest of the schools are publicly funded…
34. NRW should campaign for a nationwide minimum wage. (disagree) I vaguely remember being convinced that the federal minimum wage was an economically illogical institution the last time I read about it… so I’ll stick with that.
35. Foreigners who have already lived for many years without trouble in NRW should be granted a right to permanently stay (agree).
36. In regional elections: 16-year-olds allowed to vote! (disagree) I don’t think I should have voted when I was sixteen…
37. NRW should promote programs against Right-extremism (agree)
38. More coal power plants should be built in NRW (disagree).
I was then given the option to weight certain opinions… I decided to abstain from this customization.
I was then asked to choose (only) 7 parties to compare my choices to. Here are the ones I picked, some because they’re the biggest parties, others just for kicks, and a couple just kind of randomly:
CDU – Christian Democrats – the current party in power, the party of Angela Merkel
SPD – Social Democrats – the largest party after the CDU. Very centered, the traditional party of the working class.
Grüne – Green Party – Originally a one-topic party, founded as a body against nuclear power. They’ve diversified since then.
Die Linke – The Left – Democratic Socialist party, sort of a carryover from the former East Germany
Piraten – The Pirate Party – A new, young party devoted to the internet. They are criticized for their monothematic approach, but they welcome all opinions.
pro NRW – The pro Nordrhein Westfalen Party – An extremely right-wing (read: neo-Nazi) party. I chose this one to be compared to just based on the name, because I live in NRW. I had no idea they were this way.
NPD – National Democratic Party – This is the closest thing to a modern Nazi party. There are efforts to forbid its existence.
Familie – The Family Party – A minor conservative party, and the party with the smallest Wikipedia page. I chose this party randomly to spice up my list, again not knowing what they stood for.
And the results are in! My hypothesis was that I’d match up with the Grüners, but let’s see what the Wahl-o-Mat had to say!
The Familien-Partei??? Really? And then the Piraten? Hilarious. I’m only really familiar enough with the Pirates to know that they probably won’t be winning many seats this Sunday… but I guess we’ll see! I have to look into this Family party a little closer, then I’ll report back. My roommate has a theory that the Wahl-O-Mat is rigged by Die Linke, because all of her friends ended up with Die Linke on top despite not really supporting them. And sure enough they’re the third place on my list, too. I’m a little disquieted by how long those yellow bars are for pro NRW and NPD… I wish that chart had some kind of scale on it. I’m beginning to doubt the Wahl-O-Mat and its Sorting Hat-like powers.
The Lernen to Talk Show: Episode 30 – Karneval!
In general, there are two things people immediately associate with Cologne. The mammoth Kölner Dom, and Karneval. The two are in fact connected, as Karneval is a strangely Catholic holiday, similar to Mardi Gras in New Orleans and Carnivale in Rio. From Thursday until the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday, the whole city turns to a huge party. Hundreds of thousands of people, united in the spirit of indulgence, flock to the city to wear costumes and drink in the streets. Schools are closed, bars are opened, and merry is made until the bell tolls twelve Tuesday night, at which point everybody parades around their neighborhood with a dummy called a Nubbel, which represents the sins of Karneval. The Nubbel is then burned and the weekend is forgotten and everybody goes back to work. One of the many highlights of the festival comes on “Rose Monday” in the form of an enormous parade. I managed to find a couple LTTS guests in the midst of the mayhem while waiting for the parade to start. Stay tuned after the conversation for some exclusive clips of the start of the parade, including the official opening speech given of course in Kölsch, the dialect of German so dearly spoken in these parts.
1:43 – You should’ve seen it.
1:52 – I wanted to have him on the show, but unfortunately he was standing on the other side of the parade.
2:13 – Chilling.
3:26 – One of the coolest things about Cologne is that it’s filled with old medieval structures like this one.
Bonus! I uploaded this episode in 1080p. Do you notice the difference? I’m not sure I do…
