AMD 1: Ryen Krusinga

Für diese Aufgabe, ich habe Englisch-Unterrichte für Deutschen auf YouTube geschaut. [For this assignment, I watched English lessons for Germans on YouTube.] At first, I just converted YouTube to its German format and looked around at German videos. Then I got the idea to find videos designed to teach English to German-speakers - I thought it would provide a very interesting perspective. Indeed, it did. With the change in perspective, I could see the everyday German words and phrases, many of which were new to me, that Germans teaching English find most important. For example, in the first video I watched, I learned that "es tut mir leid" means "I'm sorry." I don't remember learning that phrase in German 101 (but it was probably mentioned at some point in passing). Given what I know about German grammar, I recognize the use of dative case in "es tut mir leid"; it reminds me of "es tut mir weh," which means, "it hurts me." If wehtun is the separable verb for hurt, I imagine that leidtun is the separable verb for "feel sorry for."

Dies war das zweite Video, dass ich gesehen habe. It was about common mistakes that Germans make when translating to English. Among the mistakes were translating the verb "meinen" to "mean," "Thema" to "theme," and "aktuelles" to "actual." These are misleading cognates that don't quite mean the same thing in the different languages. This video was one of a very long series, which forms an entire course about the English language. The way our German professors speak German in the classroom, the narrator speaks English (with a noticeable accent) to the audience, except when explaining something technical.

I watched another video from the same lecture series about indirect speech. The narrator pointed out that Germans learning English must watch out for the word "that," because in English no comma precedes it. I was fascinated to see the English language dissected from the perspective of a foreigner - for me (anyone else), the grammatical technicalities of my native language are simply reflexes.