How to Become a Couch Potato, 101

Since some of my friends know that I am a big sports fan, I have been asked several times about what I will do when I get overseas to keep watching/following my baseball.  I tell them that I will be able to follow baseball (and college basketball and football, for that matter) online with things like streaming audio and video.  I will even be able to keep up with my TV shows online.   I pretty much watched most of the last season of 24 a day late, streaming online.  This is just another way that technology has made the world that much smaller, and much more convenient.

Yesterday, I found the BBC foreign language learning website.  One of the categories on the German site gave several links to German TV.   Until then, I hadn't considered using the internet to watch TV going back the other direction.  I clicked on the first link, to German Channel 1, Das Erste (the first)  I thought that I would sit back and just watch a little TV, and see how well I could pick up what all was going on.  I decided that I would start with the evening news.

I have to admit, that the speed of the news anchor was too fast for me to catch everything he was saying. (I pretty much got every 5th word)  The lead last night in on Das Erste was about the Christmas Day "Jockstrap bomber."  It talked about the White House, Obama, the CIA, etc.  It was interesting to see the American front page news through the eyes of the foreign media.  The main discussion was on how the bombing attempt was affecting airport security in Germany.  The effect (note that I have used affect as a verb, and effect as a noun) that it was having was nominal.   There was a story about funding of a new museum in the eastern part of the country.  Then there was the weather report!

Now, here is a part of the news that I am sure to have better than a 20% chance of precipitation understanding.  I was right on this, but two things stuck out to me.   High pressure on the map was listed with an H, like you see here in the states, but low pressure on the map was with a T.  Low pressure in German is Niederdruck, so I am a little confused about that. 

Also I realize that I need to learn the metric system.  0 degrees means something to me (32 F) but -9, well I have absolutely no idea what that means.  Yes I know the formula:  Tc=(5/9)*(Tf-32), but I really don't want to have to convert back in my head every time I read a temperature.

Ok, all this talk about weather is really boring.  Let's see what else is on this station.  The next show I click on turns out to be a soap opera called Verbotene Liebe (forbidden love)  I only watch about 10 minutes of this, mostly because I don't want to get myself sucked into a plot line.  Anyway, two things stuck out like sore thumbs when I started watching the show.   The first, the theme song is "Forbidden Love" sung in ENGLISH.   Really?   Couldn't get David Hasselhoff to sing it for you?   In German?  Then one of the male characters leaves the room singing "Jingle Bells,"  again...in English!   This whole thing struck me as kind of funny.  Here I am trying to watch a German TV show, and I am getting English songs.

Anyway, I mentioned that I was watching German Soap Operas online, and a couple of friends gave me words that I found to be very interesting:

Dauerglotzer = Couch potato

Pantoffelheld  = Henpecked husband  (the dude with the nagging wife)

die Glotze = roughly idiot box....slang for der Fernseher, which is television.

Note that the slang term is feminine and the normal word is masculine.   Perhaps, the guy sits who is sitting in front of der Fernseher being a Dauerglotzer....is really a Pantoffelheld for spending way too much time in front of die Glotze. (in her honest opinion)

I want a Nilpferd or a Flußpferd for Christmas

Masculine, Feminine, or Neutral?   This is the question that I am starting to ask myself these days.   I took a couple of years of German in high school for two basic reasons:

1. I thought that it would be helpful if I went to Engineering school. (I went to Georgia Tech for a year, but never got far enough along to make the German pay off)
2. Because everyone else was taking Spanish and I wanted to be different.

Little did I know that I would again take German in college as part of my language requirements for music, and that I would end up singing a ton (like 60% of my repertoire) of German music.  Somehow God seems to point us in the right direction. I could only imagine taking Spanish in high school, and not German, and trying to now sing the amount of Bach, Haydn, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schumann, Beethoven, Mozart, etc. that I do.  I would struggle with it, I think, the way I have to work hard at singing French repertoire.


All of this being said, I did kind of skate by with my German classes in both high school and college.  I have never been great at language per se.  I have enough problems with English grammar and spelling. It is no shock that my SAT math scores were 150 points higher than my English scores.  Like many young men, I was drawn to science and math, and so I read less, and I wrote even less than that.  So, when it comes to German grammar, (which has its own very different structure)  I need a very heavy dose of "crash course."

On an artist's budget (or non-budget)  I cannot really afford Rosetta Stone to help me beef up my language skills.  On my trip to northern Italy this past summer, I had some private German lessons. (mostly because I was further advanced than most of my colleagues, who speak Italian, but not German)   I can honestly say that I didn't learn much actual language, but I did learn what I needed to learn before I moved to Germany. I need to focus my learning (or relearning) of German to two key areas:

1. Vocabulary, vocabulary, and more vocabulary.   It does me no good to only really know 5 verbs and only basic German when you are trying to build relationships with conductors, agents, and other colleagues.
2. Grammar, grammar, and grammar.   The expanded vocabulary does me no good if I use it like a three year-old, just pointing at things and saying what they are. For example,  I see a lemon; I point at it and say "die Zitrone."

Since Rosetta Stone is a bit out of my price range.  Ok it is $500 out my price range.  I found a suitable replacement in 9 discs worth of Instant Immersion German, in 3 levels for my computer.   This coupled with my dictionary, my box of 1001 flash cards, my German verb workbook, and a couple of other tools will be my guide in the near future to get myself back to a basic level of fluency.  From there, I was advised by a German colleague in Munich, that I should then grab a newspaper and start translating it.  I have also stumbled across the BBC websites' free on-line language learning center.   Now this site is really cool.



So, what cool words did I learn yesterday?    I learned:

• der Frosch = the frog
• die Ente = the duck
• das Nilpferd, das Flußpferd = the hippo

I am not quite sure where I will use them.   I am not quite sure why the German language says that a frog is masculine, a duck is feminine, and a hippo is neutral.  Perhaps it is because frogs turn into princes, ducks are cute and cuddly, and well, I am still confused about the Nile-horse/River-horse.   All I know is that I have three new words in my new vocabulary!  Now, off to learn 3 more!