The Lernen to Talk Show: Episode 27 – Settlers of Catan!

Join me, fair viewers, on a journey to the happiest place on earth! Yes that’s right, the hexagonal island of Catan! Where sheep and wheat are legal tender, and it’s not the depth of your pockets that matters, but the length of your street! On my last night in Duisburg I attempted to explain the beloved board game to moje pani Ola and Ania in five minutes. As you will see, it was a horrible failure. Special thanks to Julia for working the camera and to Rena tossing a couple words my way when I needed them. Oh and thanks to Tim for the t-shirt!

0:20 – Close.

0:39 – I think that’s the last time I will make this “um…zu” mistake… I hope!

0:54 – I realized during the making of this episode that I say the word also way too often. I’m trying to work on that.

1:23 – Apparently the “Klaus Teuber”, printed prominently on the box, isn’t a German enough name.

1:33 – I messed up a case and a gender in this sentence. Correctly said, it would be Wir sind auf einer Insel, die Catan heisst.

1:39 – Nice try, but Objektiv doesn’t mean objective. It means “lens”.

2:00 –  I’m not sure what Ania says here… Ania, what did you say here? Vandaloo?

2:13 – Rookie mistake. Did you know, any word in German that ends in -ung is feminine? That is, the nominative indefinite article for a word with that ending will always be “eine”. Therefore I have no excuse for messing it up here.

2:20 – Oh good, I catch myself this time around.

2:23 – The plural of Strasse is Strassen. I make this mistake a lot with words that end in -e. Some nouns are pluralized by adding an -e to the end. And nouns that already end in -e when they’re singular are usually pluralized by adding an -n. Like in this case, with Strassen!

2:33 – Even though Ania just reminded me that it’s das Ziel, not der Ziel…

2:47 – I’m not really sure how to say this correctly. I wanted to say that there are different ways to earn points in the game. The best word for “way” I could think of was Weg, which I’m pretty sure is used more in a geographical/orienteering sense.

2:58 – A better way to say “A city is worth two points” would be “Eine Stadt gibt zwei Punkte”.

3:35 – Würste : Sausages :: Wüste : Desert. Cut me some slack.

4:14 – Here I got the 4 minute warning… How did I ever think I could do this?

5:09 – Typical Rena, always sabotaging the Lernen to Talk Show.

5:16 – I thought that I said this way wronger than I actually did… I was pretty close! More correct would have been, Stellt euch vor, es gibt verschiedene Nummern. Dative baby!

5:45 – She’s allowed to say that.

6:47 – Very shrewd observation, Ania. I just wanted to experience The Settlers of Catan as its inventors first envisioned it!