Saturday, November 14, 2015

Die vernetzter Tag -- Connectivity: What does it look like?

Herr Keller . . . ist vernetzt. Hier ist sein Tag.

10 German Animated Movies You Don't Wanna Miss

Cancel your Friday night plans! Give your flash cards and Tandem Partner conversation practice a little rest and start putting holds on some of your library’s German movies. Not just any movies, though—we’re talking animation today.

Oh yes, you’ll be adding some truly fascinating stories to your shelf, alongside “Toy Story” and “Frozen.” Even if you thought you were way past your animated movie phase, it’s time to rewind the clock and get settled in for some refreshing cartoon time. There are plenty of reasons why watching German animated movies will help your language.

Discover the wondrous German film industry. Disney and Pixar may be dominating the American screens, but Germany has its own fantastic animated movie industry too. Sure, you could always watch one of your Disney favorites dubbed into German, but aren’t you a tiny bit curious as to what the Germans are producing?

Be swept away by fresh stories and interesting characters. Quite a few of their movies are based on local legends and fairy tales—stories you might never hear in America.

Listen to clear German. Most animated movies use clear, understandable German. After all, they’re aimed at kids who might not be so good at the challenges of their own mother tongue just yet. Thanks to their simple sentences, easy vocab and clearly spoken dialogue, beginner and intermediate German learners will find they have no problem watching these movies.

How to Learn German with Animated Movies

It can be easy to get lost in all the fun of the story and forget you actually wanted to use the movie as a language tool. So consider watching the movie once just to grasp the plot, then a few days later you can turn the same film into an active German exercise.

If you hear a word, but aren’t 100% on the meaning, you should quickly jot it down (or hit pause first). After the movie, check your list.
1st —did you spell every word correctly? If not, add it to your vocab list and keep returning to it every other day or so until you can spell it from memory.

2nd, when you look up a word’s spelling, also look up its meaning. Add this to your vocab list too, and keep reviewing it until you know the word inside out!

If you get a bit too stuck and don’t have a clue what’s going on, pause the German version and watch the previous 5 minutes in English just to refresh the story in your head. (Almost every DVD will have an English version. If yours doesn’t, YouTube is your friend.)

If you manage to watch the full movie in German the first time, well done you! It can also be a good idea to rewatch in English, just to make sure you really did understand everything.

You can expect that watching these excellent animated movies will inspire your creative side in unique ways.

All right, now let’s get to the films!

10 Must-see German Animated Movies You’ll Absolutely Love

1. “Der Mondmann” (The Man on The Moon) is a beautifully animated movie that was released in Germany in 2012. It tells the tale of the man on the moon. One day he becomes bored of being alone up in space, so he decides to head out on an adventure to Earth. The movie then follows him on his various adventures on our planet with all the friends he meets.

2. “Felidae” This 1994 cartoon may look like a German version of “The Aristocats,” but it’s actually far from it. In fact, this is the only animated movie on this list that isn’t aimed at kids. It’s a neo-noir horror-thriller, so if you’re not too keen on going back to kids’ films, this is the one for you. It follows the eponymous Felidae as he goes around his neighborhood trying to solve a string of mysterious feline murders.

3. “Lissi und der wilde Kaiser” (Lissi and the Wild Emporer) is an enchanting animation suitable for the whole family. It’s a parody of the famous Sissi movies, which were popular in Austria and went on to become the most successful German-speaking film trilogy ever. With such a solid base, it’s no surprise that “Lissi” is such a great film!

After a yeti makes a pact with the devil, he must go and kidnap the prettiest girl in the world—enter our heroine Princess Lissi! The movie follows her adventure with the yeti and her subsequent romance.

4. “Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed” (The Adventure of Prince Achmed) Released in 1926, this is the earliest surviving animation movie in the world, so there’s plenty of reason to watch this classic, even if you don’t need any German listening practice! The movie was made by various famous avant-garde animators of the time including Walter Ruttman and Berthold Bartosh. The plot is based on different parts of the “One Thousand and One Nights“ folk tales from the Middle East.

5. “Die Abenteuer von Pico und Columbus” (The Adventure of Pico and Columbus) You might recognize “Die Abenteuer von Pico und Columbus,” as it was dubbed into English and released throughout America and Canada after its German release. The story follows the famous explorer Christopher Columbus on his fearless journey across the waves. He befriends a woodworm, and together the pair have to rescue a magical firefly from her despicable captor.

6. “Ritter Rost” (Knight Rusty) ... is a knight who, along with his trusty dragon, Cole, lives in the kingdom of Scrapland. After winning the great knight tournament, Rost runs into trouble after his horse’s engine is stolen (everything in Scrapland is made out of scrap metal, you see…). Rost must then set out on an adventure to regain his honor and save the kingdom from the evil Prince Novel.

7. “Sandmännchen” (Little Sandman) How cute is the little Sandmännchen?! This über-charming stop-motion animation comes from the GDR and is based on Hans Christian Andersen’s Ole Lukøje character. -- Now, technically, it isn’t a movie, it’s a very popular children’s TV series, but it’s too much of a German classic to leave off an animation list. Many German children grow up watching the adorable Sandmännchen before going to bed.

8. “Lauras Stern” (Laura's Star) is a children’s book and was made into a feature film in 2004. When Laura moves to a new city, she ends up making friends with a small star who has fallen to Earth. After Laura mends one of the star’s broken limbs with a band-aid, they—along with Laura’s brother—go off on various adventures.

9. “Der 7bte Zwerge” (The 7th Dwarf), a lively 2014 animation, was released in the cinemas as 3D, and is a sequel to the two live action films “7 Zwerge – Männer allein im Wand” and “7 Zwerge – Der Wald ist night Genug.” The plot takes inspiration from both Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, and follows Bubi—the titular seventh dwarf—as he tries to help the princess to find Prince Charming.

10. “Die sieben Raben” (The Seven Ravens) is an animated puppet film from the 1930s. Based on one of the fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm collection, it tells the tale of a peasant whose daughter is born very ill. He sends his seven sons off to fetch water. They end up dropping their bucket into the well, and when they do not return, the father believes they have gone off to play. Cursing them, he turns them into witches. Once the sister has grown, she goes out to find her brothers. After various adventures, her brothers are finally returned to her and transform back into human form. The puppetry in this old film can be pretty creepy at times, but you’ll soon be enchanted by the charming story.

There are loads of other fab animated movies out there. Once you’re done with all the animated films from German-speaking countries, you can always watch the German dubbed versions of your favorite Disney and Pixar movies...

After studying German and Philosophy at The University of Nottingham, Laura Harker relocated to Berlin in 2012. She now works as a freelance writer and is also assistant editor at Slow Travel Berlin.

From Switzerland: Threema

A friend forwarded me information about this site https://threema.ch/en for texting to Germany plus other features.

The key to its utility seems to be that it's 'secure'. I pass it along to you because of your school partnership. FYI: I'll just share here what this one person said about Threema:

"Yes, I do use Skype for conversation. I know that Skype also has a messaging function, which is similar to an “instant messenger” but I don’t really use that. While Threema is indeed a messaging service, I use it in lieu of texting/SMS. There are several reasons why I don’t text much - one of them is data privacy concerns. It also has other functions, like polling your friends, which might be interesting to others. But as I said, out of principle, it's basic data privacy and end-to-end encryption that are of importance to me.

My brother, who turned me on to Threema, said that he personally does not (yet) have that many Threema contacts. I find that hard to believe. It appears that even in Germany most people use WhatsApp, because it is free (!!! at least for the first year) - compared to the whopping *one-time ever* 1.99 euro investment in Threema.

I'm surprised how few people seem to care about data privacy. And considering who actually owns/is behind “free” services such as Skype (Microsoft?) or WhatsApp (Facebook?), I'm happy to have found a way that focuses on the old German proverb –
   “Umsonst ist nur der Tod, und selbst der kostet das Leben”.
[Only Death comes for free; well, all it costs is   your life.]

Yup, I think Threema is awesome."

Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Sentance Structure in German and Expressing Time elements

Another share from the amazing Emanuel of GERMAN IS EASY!

Sentence Structure Work Out – Events in time

Posted on November 9, 2015 | 11 Comments

Hello everyone,

I hope you’re all fit and well rested because this week it is more than time to give our German language muscles a little work out. As last time we’ll focus on the word order and sentence structure core, and this time we’ll focus on one very important muscle in particular: the timeceps.
You might have guessed it. Today’s exercise is all about:

talking about the order of events

So let’s put on our sport’s pants, get out our sport’s pens and dive right in.
Talking about time in any form is an essential part of any language. If you want a complete lowdown you can check out our Time Mini Series (link below), but we’ll go over everything we need for the exercise right now, so don’t worry.

If you think you don’t need it you can jump right into the action here.

A bit of background

Today, we’ll focus entirely on events happening one after the other.
Take two actions A and B:

A: Thomas brushes his teeth.
B: Thomas goes to bed.

One happens after the other and you have to communicate the order. The example isn’t all that interesting, of course, but this stuff is a crucial part of every day talk, so it’s no surprise that there are several ways to do it.

Thomas brushes his teeth. Then/after that, he goes to bed.
After having brushed his teeth, Thomas goes to Bed.
Before going to bed, Thomas brushes his teeth.
Thomas brushes his teeth, after which/whereupon he goes to bed.
Thomas goes to bed. He has brushes his teeth before that.

What all these have in common is that we used a helper word or phrase to express the order. Knowing how to handle these helper words can really give your ability to talk a huuuuuge boost which is why I’m always baffled to see how late and interspersed they’re introduced in textbooks. But hey, at least we got like 4 dozen different veggies covered. I like my veggies covered, but only with sauce…. haha.
Anyway, there are two aspects to know about a helper word: its meaning and its grammar or function. The meaning is what you can find in a dictionary, but what about function? Well, we can distinguish between three main functions. But we’ll ignore prepositions today, so we’re left with two:

Before I go home… this is a subordinating conjunction
Do you want to do it before or after …. this is an adverb.

Now you might be like “Wait, why should I care about the function again?”. Well, because you’re learning German and German likes to have one word for each function. Using a word for the wrong function sounds quite stupid and might not even be understandable.
So let’s now take a look at the words we need to express the order of events and see how they work in German.

the adverbs

Generally, time adverbs are essentially stand alone indications of time. That means, you can use them to answer the question “When?”, so they are enough to fill a when-box. If you put them in position one in German, the verb will have to come after them. Here are the 4 must-have words:

dann – then
danach – after that
davor – before that, before
vorher – before, less pointy sounding version of before that

And here they are in action

Thomas putzt sich die Zähne. Dann/danach geht er ins Bett.
Thomas geht ins Bett. Davor/vorher putzt er sich die Zähne.

The Subblahblah conblah-things

The purpose of subordinating conjunctions, let’s call them sucos, is to conjoin sentences, to integrate one into the other on a grammatical level. Yeah, sounds lame. But they’re useful. And the time-sucos also express the temporal relations between the sentences. But sucos can NOT answer the question “when?” just by themselves. They can do NOTHING by themselves. They only work in combination with their sentence, their action. Sucos are ALWAYS at the beginning of a phrase and German sucos have the extra quirk of sending the verb to the very end.
Here are the sucos for expressing the order of events:

bevor, ehe (rare) – before (as in “Before I do something”)
nachdem – after (as in “After I did something”)

Only those two? Yup, only those two. Here they are in action:

Bevor Thomas ins Bett geht, putzt er sich die Zähne.
Thomas putzt sich die Zähne, bevor er ins Bett geht.)
Nachdem Thomas sich die Zähne geputzt hat, geht er ins Bett.
(Thomas geht ins Bett, nachdem er sich die Zähne geputzt hat.)

There’s one important thing about nachdem and that has to do with the tenses.

Nachdem ich mir die Zähne putze, gehe ich ins Bett.

This isn’t entirely wrong, I think, but it sounds really really theoretical. In practice, the part right after nachdem is pretty much always in spoken past. The other part can be either, present or spoken past of future but the nachdem-bit is always spoken past. So if you choose to use nachdem in the exercise, you might have to adjust the tense.

Cool, but now we’re set, I think.

The exercise

As always in this type of exercise, I’ll give you a few bland sentences and your task is to combine them into one sentence or at least a meaningful text using the words we’ve talked about or others, if you have other ideas. Let’s do an example:

Ich gucke meine Mails nach. (A)
Ich mache den Computer aus (B)

Nachdem ich meine Mails nachgeguckt habe, mache ich den Computer aus.
Bevor ich den Computer ausmache, gucke ich meine Mails nach.
Ich gucke meine Mails nach. Dann mache ich den Computer aus.
…

This is the core task in all of the examples and the only thing that makes medium and hard more difficult is the clutter – the side information you have to fit in somehow.
Which of the words we’ve learned words work best, depends on context. Like… sometimes, the before-ness of before works better than the after-ness of after. Yeah, that wasn’t all that helpful, I know. But I’d say just go with your gut.
So, I’d say just go ahead and give it a try. If you want you can share your solutions in the comments and I’ll correct it as best I can. And if there are any systematic mistakes turning, mistakes that many people are making, we’ll tackle these in a second session.
And now viel Spaß with the Übung :)
Oh, in some examples I marked the events that happen in sequence … A happens before B

** easy **

1)
Thomas hat die Küche aufgeräumt. (A)
Thomas hat The Voice of Germany geguckt. (B)

2)
Maria gibt die Tomaten und den Weißwein in die Pfanne. (B)
Maria brät die Zwiebeln an. (A)

3)
Thomas gibt seiner Freundin einen Guten-Morgen-Kuss.
Thomas guckt seine E-Mails nach.
(I’ll leave the order up to you here)

4)
Ellie macht gern auf ihrem Balkon Yogalates (blend between Yoga and Pilates. And yes, it’s kindofathing here)
Ellie trinkt ihren Beauty-Kaffee.

**medium**

11)
Maria guckt sich einen Film an.
Maria guckt immer Trailer und Reviews auf Youtube.
Maria ärgert sich jedes Mal im Kino, dass sie schon alles weiß.

22)
Maria macht eine Rundreise durch Schweden.
Maria fragt den Kellner dem Restaurant in Stockholm, wieviel Tip/Trinkgeld sie ihm mindestens geben sollte. (B)
Maria hat keine Ahnung, was in Schweden üblich ist.
Maria gibt Trinkgeld. (A)

** harrrrrrrrrd like a diamond**

X)
Johannes bereitet den Beamer für das Meeting vor. (A)
Johannes holt Kaffee und Kekse. (B)
Johannes macht zur Zeit ein Praktikum bei einer Marketingagentur.
Johannes’ Studium beginnt erst in 3 Monaten.
Johannes wollte nicht nur zu Hause rumsitzen.

Y)
Thomas hat sich nie für klassische Musik interessiert. (A)
Thomas hat Sarah kennengelernt. (B)
Thomas freut sich auf Facebook total über das Jahresabo für die Berliner Philharmoniker.
Thomas hat das Jahres-Abo im Radio gewonnen.

Z)
Julia, Ron und Phillip suchen einen neuen Mitbewohner für ihre WG.
Julia, Ron und Phillip lassen jeden Bewerber am Eingang ein Bild malen (A)
Julia, Ron und Phillip zeigen dem Bewerber die Wohnung (B)
Julia, Ron und Phillip wollen ein bisschen Spaß haben.

Those last three are pretty tough so if you didn’t get them right… don’t worry. And that brings us to a question many of you are probably asking now.

Where are the solutions??

With this kind of exercise, there is not THE one correct solution. Even for the easy ones, there are several possibilities to get the message across. And that’s what matters.
So I’m not so sure that giving a solution is a good idea because it might make you frustrated that you didn’t do it the way I did.

On the other hand, I think I would really appreciate a sample solution myself, so I’ll post one in the comments … in the coming days. Yeah… you can booh all you want :)

Meanwhile, here's one of the first posters' comments. What do you think?

Another awesome post! I don’t have enough words to tell you how helpful your blog is to me.
I tried to make the sentences, but I have to admit that some of them were pretty tough. So, I’m sure I made a lot of mistakes:

EASY:
1) Nachdem Thomas die Küche aufgeräumt hat, guckte er The Voice of Germany.
2) Bevor Maria die Zwiebeln anbrät, gibt sie die Tomaten und den Weißwein in die Pfanne.
3) Nachdem Thomas seiner Freundin einen Guten-Morgen-Kuss gegeben hat, guckte er seine E-Mails nach.
4) Nachdem Ellie ihren Beauty-Kaffee getrunken hat, machte sie gern auf ihrem Balkon Yogalates.

MEDIUM: [sorry for making them so long]
1) Bevor Maria sich einen Film anguckt, guckte sie immer Trailer und Reviews auf Youtube. Deshalb ärgerte sie sich jedes Mal im Kino, dass sie schon alles weiß.

2) Maria machte eine Rundreise durch Schweden. Sie ging in ein Restaurant in Stockholm, und wenn sie ihr Essen beendet hatte, wollte sie Trinkgeld geben. Aber sie keine Ahnung hatte, was in Schweden üblich war. Daher fragte sie den Kellner, wieviel Trinkgeld sie ihm mindestens geben sollte.

HARD:
1) Johannes macht zur Zeit ein Praktikum bei einer Marketingagentur, weil sein Studium erst in 3 Monaten beginnt und er nicht nur zu Hause rumsitzen wollte. Deswegen bereitet er den Beamer für ein Meeting vor. Danach holt er Kaffee und Kekse.
2) Bevor Thomas Sarah kennengelernt hat, hatte er sich nie für klassische Musik interessiert. Er hatte sich auf Facebook total über das Jahresabo für die Berliner Philharmoniker gefreut, und endlich hat er es im Radio gewonnen.
3) Julia, Ron und Philip suchen einen neuen Mitbewohner für ihre WG. Nachdem sie dem Bewerber die Wohnung gezeigt haben, lassen sie jeden Bewerber am Eingang ein Bild malen, weil sie ein bisschen Spaß haben wollen.
Thanks a lot! :D

Hier noch ein Versuch:

1. Nachdem Thomas die Küche aufgeräumt hat, hat er The Voice of Germany geguckt.
2. Maria brät die Zwiebeln an, und dann gibt sie die Tomaten und den Weißwein in the Pfanne.
3. Elle trinkt ihren Beauty-Kaffee. Davor macht sie gern auf ihrem Balkon Yogalates.

1. Bevor Maria einen Film anguckt, guckt sie immer Trailers und Reviews. Daher ärgert sie sich jedes Mal im Kino, dass sie schon alles weiß.
2. Während Maria eine Rundreise durch Schweden gemacht hat, hat sie keine Ahnung, was in Schweden üblich war. Marie gab Trinkgeld, und danach fragte sie den Kellner dem Restaurant in Stockholm wieviel Trinkgeld sie ihm mindestens geben sollte.

1. Bevor Johannes sein Studium in 3 Monaten beginnt, macht er ein Praktikum bei einer Marketingagentur, weil er nicht nur zu Hause rumsitzen wollte. Vor er den Kaffee und Kekse für das Meeting holt, bereitet er den Beamer vor.

2. Thomas hat sich nie für klassische Musik interessiert, und dann hat er aber Sarah kennengelernt und danach das Jahresabo im Radio gewonnen. Heutzutage freut er sich auf Facebook total über das Jahresabo für die Berlin Philharmoniker, die er mit Sarah regelmäßig zuhört.

3. Julia, Ron und Phillip wollen ein bisschen Spaß haben, während sie einen neuen Mitbewohner für ihre WG suchen. Bevor sie dem Bewerber die Wohnung zeigen, lassen sie jeden Bewohner am Eingang ein Bild malen.

Deutsch heute