Kultur 6

I was happy we read the article about the Bild; many times I read an article in the news which quotes the Bild as a source. From now on I will know how to disregard such citations seeing as this news paper has little to no validity, as it seems.

The article about recycling gefallet mir euch. It reminded me of the complex and serious method implemented in England. At first I thought that the EU does a good job of educating and funding such infrastructure. Then again, I don't remember any such concern from visits to Poland and Greece, so I guess this is again an east-west dichotomy. 

Last, but most definitely not least, i was thrilled to read the Tübingen's sister-city in the US is Ann-Arbor. Anna Adler must be overjoyed. 

AMD 6

Seeing as I enjoyed Janosch's book so much I decided to buy another one for my kids, in English, and see if they like this style as well. I found one  titled "I'll Make You Well, Tiger, Said the Bear" which looked nice. It turned out to be a great pick: the story is nice and random much like ours and is also a little quirky, but my kids love it and force me to read it every evening. This is unfortunate because it is much longer than the Panama book and has tons of text. But it is truly a cute story and the tiger and the bear are as adorable as ever- the tiger thinks he is sick and the bear takes good care of him and even takes him to the animal hospital. A good read!

Kultur 5

Once again I found that Germans and Israelis are similar in some aspects: in Israel no one will say “excuse me” when they bump into you on the street. It is even more likely that they will start a fight over it.

Yet this reading brought up more differences then similarities: Israelis hit on girls heavily and would probably have a hard time in Germany. Also, public restrooms in Israel aren't quite as clean as they seem to be in Germany.

 last but not least: though the rules of engagement seem quite strict in bars, Germans seem to be very open about sex. This is an interesting complexity that shows once again that the Germans are truly a nation ridden with contradictions.

AMD 4

Since I had no idea what to do for this I browsed some other students' AMD's to get some ideas. This resulted in me watching some South Park auf Deutsche, some German speaking trailers and even part of an episode of an obscure show called Extr@. Surprisingly this last item seemed to be the most helpful. In this ridiculously outdated comedy(?) the actors speak so slowly it is easy to pick up on specifics. This is how I stated to pick up on patterns and notice things we learnt as well as some thing we haven't gotten to yet, such as future tense.
Even though this was helpful, for the next AMD I plan on finding a good German TV show to watch.

Kapitel 4 Kultur

a few years ago a good friend of mine went to Berlin for the summer to study German. on her first day in town she walked around with her 2 year old son to get to know the surrounding area. suddenly she herd form behind her shouting and a bell ringing continuously. next thing she knew a bike hit her from behind, causing her to fall flat on the ground with her son. thankfully they were OK, frightened but OK.

when she told me this story i thought that one of two could have happened: either all the stories we heard of Germans as a polite people were made up or that this was an a-typical story. reading the Kultur texts for this chapter i understood that this wasn't a fluke. Germans love their bike-lanes and are willing to defend them even at the price of mowing down innocent pedestrians. not necessarily a polite people but rather a people who cherish their rules and norms to an extreme extent.