AMD1

For AMD1, I watched the rest of Bella Martha in Deutsch. Over the break, I talked to my cousin, who moved to Germany a few years back. He told me that the dialects that exist in Germany are much more significant than any regional variations of English. (I tried talking to him and my uncle in German a little bit, but the Lions and the Red Wings were on, so it proved difficult,) While I was watching the movie, occasionally I would hear things that didn’t seem to make much sense, and I wondered if it was due to some dialectic variation. For instance, Lina says, in one of the early scenes with Martha, “Mochte lieber nicht essen.” Not “Mochte nicht essen.” The subtitles translated it to a flat “I don’t want to eat.” rather than a more polite “I would prefer not to eat.” Later, Mario is speaking to Martha in private, discussing their tension in the kitchen; he tells her that he’ll leave if she really wants him to, ending his statement with “…and I’m gone.” It sounded like he said “Shone gehe ich.” Ironically, except for that little statement at the end, his conversation with her in the freezer there was one of the easiest in the movie to understand.
I got to make some other observations, and I also had some questions when I was done. When Martha is talking to Sam, she says “Gute Nacht” and he responds in kind, the subtitles reading “Good Night.” When Martha is putting Lina to bed right after, she says “Schlaf gute.” To her, which sounds like the imperative command, “sleep.” The subtitles still read “Good night,” but even if they were the same, which it didn’t sound like, why did Martha use two different salutations? I guessed formality or age, but I’m not certain.
Overall, the movie could get pretty hard to understand at times, and everything was so much easier to pick out if I went back and watched a certain part more than once. I think I’m going to try listening to German podcasts to start getting an ear for some of the smaller words, like conjunctions, articles, and prepositions, that are hard to hear, especially if the conversation is lively, or if there is background noise.