Skip to main content

America's Contribution to World Culture

Laura and I are taking an introductory German class. It’s a very international group — we’re the only Americans in the class, and the only two from the same country. Everyone speaks at least a little bit of English, so that’s the “backup” language if the teacher can’t convey a concept in Deutsch.

In last night’s class, toward the end of the class, she wanted us to play a game. We would pick celebrities or famous people, write down the German words for the things that they do, love, or are known for. Then we each were given a celebrity at random. We then had to interview each other to figure out which celebrity we were.

By the time we’d finished the list, I was stifling laughter hard enough that I was having trouble breathing. I was getting some strange looks, and I was afraid that I was disrupting the class. I was later told that a few of them were worried about what Americans would think of their descriptions, but my laughing put them at ease.

The list:

Lady Gaga
  • das Fleisch (the meat dress)
  • Musikerin (musician)
  • Tänzerin (dancer)
  • Schauspielerin (actor)
  • Sängerin (singer)
  • Mode (fashion)
  • nicht Programmierung (not a computer programmer — private joke)
  • Universal (employer)
  • Zürich Spital (Zürich hospital — another private joke)
  • Italien
  • tanzen (dancing)


Beyonce
  • NYC
  • Lotion
  • (it was agreed that most of the rest was similar to Lady Gaga)


Obama
  • rauchen (smoking)
  • Präsident (president)
  • Politiker (politician)
  • Anwalt (lawyer)
  • Jurist (law)
  • Amerika (America)
  • Washington 
  • die Geduld (patience)


Trump
  • Hochhaus (skyscraper)
  • America (America — actually, when our teacher asked where he lived, someone shouted “a mental hospital!”, but she sighed and wrote Amerika.)
  • Sich (himself — as the first answer to the question “What does he love?”)
  • Damen (women)
  • Schreien (shouting)
  • Beleidigen (insults)
  • Unternehmer (entrepreneur)


(At this point, someone said that we needed someone on the board who wasn’t American.)

Gandhi
  • Anwalt (lawyer)
  • Indien (Indian)
  • Bombay
  • Frieden (peace)
  • Yoga




Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Chromecast conceptual model

Google makes a device called Chromecast . It's a relatively inexpensive way to turn any TV into a "Smart" TV capable of playing movies or music. It's a clever bit of engineering, but I've run into a few people who have trouble understanding how they work. The key thing to understand is that the Chromecast is the device that's actually receiving and playing the movie (or whatever), and your phone is just the remote. Here's how the process works at a high level: You start watching a video on Youtube 30 seconds in, you decide that you'd like to watch the rest on your TV, so you press the "Cast" button. Your phone stops playing and tells the Chromecast "Get this video directly from Youtube and start playing at the 0:30 mark"  When your phone initially asks the Chromecast to start playing, it also specifies a "default thing" to do when the Chromecast is finished. If the Chromecast is playing a Youtube video, it might...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Virus By the Numbers

I'm writing this because there's some really insane stuff that's being said by people who should really know better, and I'm sick of discussing it one post or email at a time. So, this is my One Big Post that I'll point people toward rather than bringing it up again and again. In case you haven't noticed, we're in the middle of a pandemic. Just so that we're all using the same terminology:  The virus is Severe acute respiratory syndrome Coronavirus 2 . It's usually abbreviated SARS-CoV-2. It's a brand new kind of Coronavirus, so for a while, before it had this awkward name, people were calling it "novel coronavirus". (For the non-English speakers and D students, "novel" is another word for "new".) The disease that the virus causes is called Coronavirus Disease 2019 , and it's usually abbreviated COVID-19. It's called that because it was discovered in 2019. This came out of nowhere in China in late ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Fixing Linux Audio

This is somewhat technical, and it's aimed at people who use Linux and are comfortable editing files from the command line. I was looking for a quick fix, but discovered that most of the documentation out there is wrong. So, I had to research what it all meant, figure out what the correct settings were, and write it all down. For the Impatient If you use Linux, and you're just looking for a quick way to make your sound better, add these lines to /etc/pulse/daemon.conf or $HOME/.config/pulse/daemon.conf   default-sample-format = s32ne default-sample-rate = 192000 high-priority = yes default-fragments = 8 resample-method = speex-float-10 I've tested this on Fedora and Ubuntu with no problems. Also, if you're using an external DAC (if you're not sure, then you're not using one), be sure that it has sufficient power (either plugged directly into the computer or into a powered USB hub. DO NOT plug it into an unpowered hub or dongle. A...
Post a Comment
Read more