AMD2

   For this activity I read Mark Twain's essay "The Awful German Language." In the essay Twain points out a lot of the same problems I imagine most of us are having. The one that sticks out to me as the most difficult problem is knowing which form of a word to use in the nominative, dative, accusative, and genitive cases. This is tough especially considering I'm still not completely sure how to identify each of these cases. Twain also complains out the gender assignment of words at great length. He is pretty funny in doing so. Actually, he tries to be funny throughout the whole essay. At one point he mentions that he tried to kill any stranger who says 'sie' to him. Anyway, the gender assignment thing doesn't bother me as much because I've just accepted it in my head. Things are assigned a gender and there is really no good way of being able to tell what gender a thing might be. I imagine that through repetition these grammar issues can be resolved. Oh, reading this essay also helped me identify some things that I should work on in order to develop a better understanding of the language. Or at the very least develop a better base of knowledge that I can use to pass future German tests. I'd recommend skimming over Twain's essay to any classmate who is interested in reading something that's humorous, informative, and pertains to an English-speaker's perspective on the German language.

AMD 2

Hallo classmates!

For the AMD 2, I decided to blog about an opera that I am learning. Richard Strauss was an opera composer born in Munich, Germany (1864-1949). He is considered one of the greatest composers of the Romantic Era in music, and was a prolific opera composer (although he was notoriously self-deprecating, and supposedly described himself as such: "I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.") One of his most incredible operas is called Ariadne auf Naxos. I borrowed a DVD video of this opera from the Music Library on campus (an awesome source for hundreds of CDs and DVDs!) and watched it this weekend.

This opera tells the story of an evening at the home of the richest man in Vienna; he has planned for an opera to be performed in the same evening as a performance from a burlesque troupe. Conflict arises when the performances need to be combined; the burlesque troop, for lack of a better phrase, rolls with the punches, but the pretentious Komponist (composer) of the opera is shocked, and doesn't want his "heilige Kunst" (holy art) to be corrupted by their "low art" performance. The opera is fun because it still has luscious, beautiful music, but also uses fun, bawdy characters and comedy to lighten the mood. I already knew one piece from the opera, an aria called "Sein wir wieder gut". I am going to learn the entire role of the Komponist to put on my resume.

German is my favorite language to sing in because of the incredible consonants. It is such a fricative language, and the text is naturally expressive, so a singer only needs to focus on exact pronunciation to be expressive and communicative. The Komponist aria has amazing text such as "anderen Augen," "tiefen des daseins," "messlich," "jedoch," etc. The words are so fun to say, and it is easy to have fun singing!

Here is a video of me singing the aria from the opera:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2HMwvAiQE0

AMD 2- The Awful German Language

This was quite an interesting read, which would be good reasoning for why Hartmut recommended it. I thought Mark Twains approach to the essay was brilliant in his attack of the dative, accusative, and nominative cases and how they effect different words in different ways. He also uses great examples for ways in which the German language is generally illogical. The biggest exception for him seemed to be the capitalization of nouns because it is unmistakable for what it is, unless it is a persons name.

I think my favorite part of the essay is about the separable verb. The example for this was especially good in my opinion:

"The trunks being now ready, he DE- after kissing his mother and sisters, and once more pressing to his bosom his adored Gretchen, who, dressed in simple white muslin, with a single tuberose in the ample folds of her rich brown hair, had tottered feebly down the stairs, still pale from the terror and excitement of the past evening, but longing to lay her poor aching head yet once again upon the breast of him whom she loved more dearly than life itself, PARTED."

Given that all of his examples are a bit over the top in illustrating his point, I think this one is the best because of its length and clarity in describing a situation to the "T" and using some of the most eloquent wording. It is hard to picture this in the English language. Clearly we just have very different structures for our sentences.

I also like the way he talks about the language in the way that you can combine words together to make very complex looking and sounding words that are much longer than most. I guess we have something like this in the English language too, but it is definitely more extreme in German. I feel like they do it a little bit more often than we do and they end up with much longer words than we do in these cases.

I studied German for four years in high school in what I considered to be a very kind, but terrible teacher. He just didn't care as much about our learning than other teachers do. But from those four years, I did get a good feel for the language just through general exposure and repetition. Based on this understanding of the material, I felt like I could agree with Mark Twain on multiple levels within this essay. I don't have a knowledge base nearly as thorough as he does, but it is still moderate, and I felt like it helped me understand a lot of what he was saying pretty well. I think this made the essay a little bit easier, and definitely more interesting to read.

Liederkreis Op. 39

This semester I have made it a priority to learn Schumann's Liederkreis Op. 39. As you might expect from the title, Liederkreis is a song cycle (the title Lieder = song, kreis = circle) which is based on poetry by Joseph von Eichendorff. Although I am still slogging through learning all 12 songs in the cycle, this week I decided to do some research as to the origins to, and the history behind the songs.

Schumann wrote Liederkreis songs after spending time with his beloved Clara (who acted as a muse for many of his compositions) and her Mother in Berlin. In Berlin, Schumann watched Felix Mendelssohn (one of Schumann's musical and personal idols) sing some of his songs accompanied by Clara. Still in awe of the wonderful performance, Schumann wrote Liederkreis immediately upon his return to Leipzig. Mendelssohn was friends with and a great admirer of Eichendorff, which is probably why he is the sole poet of this song cycle.

Unlike many of Schumann's works, op. 39 bears no title page dedication. Upon completing the song cycle, Schumann sent the work to Clara with the note "there is much about you written in it." In many of the poems Eichendorff refers to a girl. For example, in Mondnacht [Moonlight Night] Eichendorff writes "Dass sie in Blutenschimmer/Von im nur traumen musst'. [That she in the shimmer of blossoms/Could only dream of him]. The quiet introspective voice of the poems is reflected by the dynamic markings: piano is by far the prevailing indication and forte only occurs as a device to emphasize particularly vivid poetic imagry, to characterize speech, or to accentuate dramatic contrasts.

Enjoy the wonderful Bryn Terfel sing some Liederkreis:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PY2pN-8P2vs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1GDk4etmmg&feature=related

See y'all morgen!

AMD 2: The Awful German Language

For this post, I decided to read one of the recommended readings. I have always found Mark Twain's pieces to be quite interesting and rather humorous, so it really wasn't a hard decision to read "The Awful German Language." It holds true that Mr. Twain did not fail to impress!

Not only did he deliver the speech in excellent German, but he had it completely entirely memorized. I appreciated Twain's boldness in his jokes about the German language. Most people are aware of the social stigmas that are associated with the German language, so it was pretty entertaining to see some of Twain's thoughts spelled out on paper.

Though all of this is grand and true, the most interesting part about "The Awful German Language" is seeing how literal translations can morph ideas. This, in turn, can lead to complete misinterpretation, especially because of the gender roles that come into play with the German language.

For instance, an exert from Twain's speech reads, "Und nie habe icy das Verlangen gehabt, der edlen Sprache zu schaden, I'm Gegenteil, nor gewünscht, sie zu verbessern; icy wollte sie bloß reformiren. Es its der Traum meines Lebens gewesen.

His translation reads, "And never have I the desire had the noble language to hurt; to the contrary, only wished she to improve- I would her only reform. It is the dream of my life been." You can see how things can get lost in translation pretty easily!

I showed my roommate, who is a German native, and she also thought that it was quite entertaining. She said she could somewhat relate to the satirical situation, since she had to learn English from scratch when she moved here in fifth grade. Though literal translations between German and English do not always mean what one intends, I would think that this happens between most languages today. That doesn't make it less funny, though.

If you haven't read the piece, I would definitely recommend it. It's very funny and the orientation of the piece was actually quite helpful as I tried to piece ideas together. I plan on reading it again closer to the end of the term, as well. Knowing more German may make for an even better read!

AMD 2 - An Experiment with Wikipedia

Hallo Freunden!

Today I decided to try to navigate Wikipedia ( Die freie Enzyklopädie) in Deutsch. My biggest surprise was first that the Haupseite (Main Page) has both a different layout and different international news! At the top of the German site it lists subjects, thankfully we've reached that in class for I could pick out all of them!

Geographie Geschichte Gesellschaft Kunst und Kultur Religion Sport Technik Wissenschaft

I decided to click on Kunst und Kultur to see what would happen next! (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Kunst_und_Kultur)

Using this page I saw that in linked to a buch of different articles as expected. It was really interesting to see articles about things in the United States. Such as

Das Apollo Theater im New Yorker Stadtteil Harlem!

I next went under the heading Darstellende Kunst und Musik. Under this heading there were links to many things which I recognized, (Film, Tanz, Ballet, Theater, Musik, Komposition, Musikgenre, Musikwissenschaft, Klassische Musik. Being a music major, (Yes I know this seems to be a common theme with me) I clicked ... Klassische Musik.

I was surprised to find so many english words and phrases intermixed with German on every page. It makes me want to explore all common used websites in their German equivalent. The tabs at the top had different things to choose from, such as lesen! I decided now to search for what I really wanted - Wagner. Scrolling up to the Search bar I saw the word in grey - Suche. Search!

( http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Wagner)

At the same time I decided to search the exact thing in the English equivalent.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Wagner)

If you compare the sites it's impressive to find that they are constructed completely differently! Different pictures, different information, different way of compiling it. It shows that Wikipedia truly is a peer edited website, for on the same topic, is so different in two languages.

On the german version of the site there was a ton more information about his relationship with Hitler directly, which to be honest, I found a little bit surprising.

I played around on some other random artikels, trying to pick up as much information as possible. It's pretty amazing how much information you can learn even when just skimming an article in another language!

Give it a try!

Happy Donnerstag!

Willkommen!!

Welcome to our class blog!

We will be using this blog throughout the semester for two kinds of assignments:

1. Once per chapter, the homework plan will direct you to post a response to the culture readings for the chapter on the blog.

2. Roughly every other week, the homework plan will direct you to post here for your Abenteuer mit Deutsch (AMD) assignment. First you do a fun activity that involves German, then you post about it. You should spend an hour total on this (maybe 45-55 minutes doing something, 5-15 minutes posting about it). See Was ist ein AMD, AMD Ideen and Beispiele for ideas. This should get you excited about the kinds of things you can do!

Whenever you post something, please include your name and the name of the assignment (e.g. AMD2, Kultur5) as labels. See "Blog: How To" for more details!