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Would you like to learn more German?
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- Category: German culture and food
Karneval is known as "die fünfte Jahreszeit" --the 5th season. It's known as Karneval, Fastnacht, or Fasching in many places in southern Germany.
Karneval is a big deal.
Their costumes are pretty fantastic, one of Heidi Klum's favorite things, and their costumes are no exception at the parade on Rosenmontag. But let's back up a few days and a few months to give you the best idea of Karneval.
It begins on November 11th at 11:11 a.m. because 11 is known as the "narrische Zahl," the fool's number, and continues through Faschingsdienstag, Fat Tuesday for Americans, the day before Aschermittwoch (Ash Wednesday).
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- Category: German culture and food
As a follow-up to yesterday's post Wer sind die Schwaben?, here's a wonderful little song, completely in Swabian and entrenched in the Swabian culture.
A few helps for understanding what they're singing:
-Swabians are really frugal, so frugal in fact, that they drop the final 'n' on a lot of words. Thus "Schwabenland" becomes "Schwabeland." "Mein" becomes "Mei." An exception to this is verbs and the final 'n' becomes a 't,' thus "sparen" (to save) becomes "sparet."
-"Wir" is pronounced as "mir" so "Mir sparet unser Geld" translates into German as "Wir sparen unser Geld."
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The Swabians are the people of Württemberg, which is part of the state of Baden-Württemberg in southern Germany. (The folk of the area of Baden are Badisch and their dialect is different.) Each area of Germany has its own characteristics and peculiarities, however since I spent a lot of time there, it's worth spending a bit of time getting to know these hard-working folk. They do not speak what you normally know of as "high German*," but they speak Swabian. It's a dialect far enough removed from Hochdeutsch that many Germans can't understand it.
While I didn't grow up speaking Swabian, I worked with a bunch of them in Stuttgart and picked up a lot of Swabian. I also discovered that I have Swabian ancestry! Des isch aber schee! (Das ist aber schön!)
Swabian is the English translation of "Schwaben." Die Schwaben. A few of their specialties are as follows:
1. Schaffen
Schaffen typically means something is being created, executed, or handled. Not to the Swabians. Schaffen means to work. And work they do. They have a phrase Schaffe, schaffe, Häusle baue: Work, work, build a house. And that's exactly what they do. They are not stereotypically but in reality a very hard-working people and they have a strong infrastructure and stable economy in Baden-Württemberg.
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- Category: Speaking German
After the Grammy Awards last night one of my German students Facebooked me and proclaimed, "Sandra Bullock speaks German!" Apparently Sandra Bullock's mother was a German opera singer and Bullock grew up in Nürnberg and studied ballet and vocal arts and even sang in her mother's opera productions.
What makes perfect sense and is astounding at the same time is Bullock's German accent--perfectly representative of the area she grew up in.
Here's a video of Bullock accepting a Bambi award, an international prize awarded by the Bambi Committee for excellence in categories ranging from pop music to sports, classical music to charity.
Watch Sandra Bullock Speak German on YouTube
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- Category: German grammar
The Weil sentence structure is a tough one for English speakers. We say "because I said so," but the Germans say "weil ich es gesagt habe," or (translated directly) "Because I so said!"
It's the exact opposite way in German. The verbs go all the way at the end.
Although Germans are, at least in the media, losing this construction faster than the ice caps are melting, there is one almost-guaranteed compliment you will receive when you can say this properly. A German will hear it and say to you, "Oh, Sie können aber gut Deutsch!"
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