The Lernen to Talk Show: Episode 9 – Dizzy Edition!

Today saw the end of the language training phase of my year in Germany. The time has fleigt. Fliegt. Fliegt wie ein Flieger. You might even call it a whirlwind. And to honor the whirlwindishness of it all, I returned to the playground seen in Episode 7 to reflect on these last two months with three of my American friends, Joe, Geoff, and Andy. They were the only people crazy enough to try speaking German while spinning around on a rickety old carousel the likes of which you’d unfortunately never see in our all too tame U.S. playgrounds. The resulting conversation was as dizzying as was the speed at which the last nine weeks elapsed. Does that make sense? Probably not. My head is still spinning from watching the video as I made the subtitles. Enjoy!

0:07 – Wahlwies is the village where I live and where this video was shot.

0:13 – Radolfzell is the city where I took language classes. Wahlwies is considered to be in “greater Radolfzell”. I didn’t mean to contradict myself here…

0:51 – I’m not sure exactly whether what I said here is correct. I don’t know if you can use the preposition “über” with the verb “fühlen”. A comment would be appreciated.

0:56 – If you look closely, you can see the see saw from Episode 7 every three seconds!

1:07 – I say this a lot because I didn’t know the word for “agree”. “I believe that also”. I say that all the time. Until now! I learned how to say “I agree” on Tuesday. Stay tuned next week when I try my best to slip it in to the conversation.

1:24 – My word order here was almost certainly askew. I’m working without my subtitle consultant this week, so hopefully I can get back to you post-post with what exactly went wrong…

1:32 – I never pluralize month correctly! It should be “Monaten”, not “Monat”.

1:41 – Here I said “kennen” when I should have said “können”. One means “to know” and one means “to be able to”.

1:45 – I had just learned the word two minutes previously. My short term memory doesn’t do well with spinning.

1:57 – Oh no! I didn’t notice this until now! Those “——” don’t meant that Joe was being censored. I just didn’t know what he said! I meant to fix this! What have I done???

2:03 – Geoff makes a good point. Focusing hard on speaking German makes you feel less dizzy, and focusing hard on not being dizzy makes you speak better German. It’s bizarre.

2:07 – Andy Duane, everybody.

2:25 – I’m not sure what Joe says here…

2:34 – See 1:45

3:09 – Geoff, I find how composed you appear to be after riding that thing unsettling.

3:13 – I think what I actually said here was “Thank you very much for looking Lernen to Talk Show, week no”. I said “Woche nein”. “Nein” sounds almost like “neun”, which is what I meant to say.

3:17 – I said “y” here instead of “und”… that’s Spanish. Funny, the same thing happened last time I was in that park with “bueno”.