St Patrick's Day Food and Beverage

St Patrick's Day Food and Beverage

A food site called The Daily Meal has quite a lot of information about how this famous "alcoholiday" (if ever there was one! :) ) is celebrated in the good ol' USA.

Read this text to get answers to these questions:

1) What is a  re-used "Fat Tuesday" float?
2) What river in which major American city is dyed kelly green?
3)  Which New England city is considered America's most Irish city?

Itzhak Perlman plays Klezmer

Itzhak Perlman plays Klezmer - YouTube

via youtube.com

Do you know what klezmer is?
Perlman calls it the soul of Jewish society.

Well, give it a listen!

Man, can that guy play the violin!

What kind of music do you guys like to listen to? I mean something that not everyone knows...

If people sing in English, do you make an effort to understand the lyrics?

Here's a post a wrote a while back  about a cool site for working with lyrics that is a lot of fun. Give it a try!

http://bestofcyberopps.blogspot.co.at/2011/03/lyrics-training.html

Late Night Jokes

Late Night Jokes
Have you ever heard of Jay Leno, Conan, David Letterman, Craig Ferguson, Jimmy Kimmel, or Jimmy Fallon?

Well, you can subscribe and have their best jokes emailed to you everyday.


Or you can look at the jokes in the archive and see who and what was the butt of their jokes over the past days, weeks and months...


Late Nite Jokes Archive

TASK: Look at the jokes for two or three days in a row. Do the topics change a
lot? What or who is being made fun of? What do you learn about American
culture from this resource??

What would you like to ask an American about the USA?

Sean Banville is a man with a lot of questions...

Even though he is actually British, he has written this question and 19 others that are bound to get you and your speaking partner talking about that little insignificant stretch of land between Canada and Mexico.

For more than 13, 000 other questions, go to Sean's complete index of over 650 topics!

This is America. Text and MP3 Files

This is America
Text & MP3 Files
There are 240 fifteen-minute programs.  That is about 60 hours of listening. And reading.

Here's what I like about this resource:

1. Great variety of topics about life in the USA.
2. The English is very easy to understand (VOA's Special English).
3. You can easily download the mp3 and take it with you.
   
4. The transcript shows you exactly what is being said so you know how the words are spelled.
5. Double-click on the words you don't know and a definition pops up. 
6. The programs are made by Voice of America radio professionals.
7. The programs are only 15 minutes long.
8. You can learn a lot about this interesting country!
   

New search engine for movie quotes

Subzin.com is a pretty awesome way to see language in a spoken context.

Try typing in a few words.. like "Frankly my dear I don't give a damn"
What famous movie is that line from? The answer is here.

...or even one word like SHRIMP. Guess what movie pops up first? I'm sure it's one you all know...

Unfortunately the search engine can't find the film one of my favorite words comes from. It's one I loved as a kid....The word is Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Do you know the film?? It stars the same actress who played Maria in the Sound of Music.

Script Links
There are many excellent links to movie and TV scripts at Script Links

Greg Mortensen is my hero

I strongly recommend you listen to this interview with Greg and a famous American journalist named Bill Moyers about the humanitarian work Greg and others are doing in Afghanistan building schools for girls.

I also strongly recommend you read Greg's books, THREE CUPS OF TEA and his most recent one, STONES INTO SCHOOLS: PROMOTING PEACE WITH BOOKS NOT BOMBS, IN
AFGHANISTAN AND PAKISTAN.


If only there were more people like Greg who had the drive to truly make the world a better place.

There is a transcript to help you understand what he has to say, but he has a very simple and easy-to-understand message about how peace can be brought to that troubled part of the world. The part of the interview that impressed me the most is the story about the "Men in Black" (Taliban) and the photo of them on the swings. Precious!

Please have a look!

What does "kindergarten" mean? German words used in the English

GermanEnglishWords.com
This is a dictionary of some German words used in English (Germanisms), each with a literal or German meaning, English definition and actual sample sentence(s) from literature and the Internet.

A simple list can be found at http://german.about.com/library/blvoc_gerloan.htm

Remember, it's a little tricky because just because a word has been borrowed into in another language does not mean it has to have the same meaning. The word KINDERGARTEN is a good example. Let me quote from the dictionary above:

A kindergarten in German-speaking countries would actually be the equivalent of a PRESCHOOL in the U.S.
A U.S. kindergarten would be VORSCHULE in German.

And when you look up the word KINDERGARTEN in a good monolingual learners' dictionary like LDOCEONLINE you will learn the following:

kin‧der‧gar‧ten [See pronunciation table in "How to use dictionary" pages] [uncountable and countable]

1 (American English) a school or class for children aged five
2 (British English) a school for children aged two to five [= nursery school]

So as you see things are often not what they seem!

I'm not hanging noodles on your ears...

This is the funny title of a new book about idioms around the world. Some of the them are pretty humorous, even the German ones ;), especially when they are translated literally into English.



You can take a Guardian quiz here
I managed to correctly half of them. I could have guessed more had I thought like a Brit. That one about the British dinner, for example...

Have fun!

Germany vs USA

Today I was looking for a short video that explained some of the main differences between the school system in the States and in Europe. I stumbled upon a fun-to-watch youtube video channel where 2 guys talk freely about their respective countries.

http://www.youtube.com/user/walkaboutlanguages

From their main page:

What happens when you take a good'ole, Bible-belt, Mississippi conservative and an urbane, plurilingual, liberal, Euro-German and put them in the middle of San Francisco?

Germany vs. USA (GvU) explores the contrasts and joys of two unlikely friends, Jim and Alex, as they learn more about each other's cultures, languages, and the greater friendship between Europe and America. Insightful, whimsical, educational and always genuine (not to mention unscripted) the show aims to bring a slice-of-life perspective to viewers around the world.

Watch some of the best Super Bowls ads ever made

Which ones do you like best?

Keep in mind who's most likely to watch the game.

Toytown Germany

Toytown is an interesting website for people who like to walk the line between German and English. It is primarily in English, and the quality of the English is very high, so it is useful for native speakers of German who are learning English. Austria is a bit too small for such a site I guess.

But in Germany there is apparently a rather large community of close to 10,000 people from English-speaking countries who are living/working there and have formed a community. The forum appears to be lively and I have found several interesting things to read there, many cross-cultural comparisons, or discussions of "untranslatables", for example.

They have links to German publications that also publish an English version such as der Spiegel, die Welt, and one that is new to me called The Local. You could find the original German text and start a parallel text collection...

Here's the link again
http://www.toytowngermany.com/

Election Maps

A guy named Mark Newman (no relation that I know of) has made some pretty cool maps showing the results of the most recent election.

He also explains that a cartogram is a map in which the sizes of states are rescaled according to their population.

As you know red plus blue makes purple.

This is the map that makes the most sense to me

It don't matter to me...

Half of all all Austrians polled recently by Gallup said that who is elected U.S. president in November makes no difference to their country. But almost all the people I have spoken with seem to favor Barack Obama. Why should they care who wins???

Can the Internet be archived?

In one word...AWESOME!

From the site:

The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.

Tag cloud for Preminger archives

TV ads

Satire -- American style

I'm probably not the only one who finds this blog (maybe the French word "blague" is a better name for it!) very funny...

The sad thing that I'm afraid it's actually going to cause more folks to vote for the little lady than to steer clear of her and her "policies". What the heck is gonna happen if McCain gets into the White House and then falls down the stairs or chokes on a pretzel?! Then this lady would become the leader of the free world?!

God help us all!!

Of course I also had to check out what the cartoonists are doing with this theme over at cagle.com

Some good ones here!
http://www.cagle.com/news/McCainPalin/main.asp

Obama's speech at the DNC

The great thing about watching and listening to this man speak is that you can learn from someone who has absolutely mastered the English language. The NY Times has synchronized the video and the transcript and added a kind of table of contents so you can jump to whatever sections sound interesting.

Truly amazing to watch (and read along).

And then McCain picked Sarah Palin to be his veep. Was this a wise move?! Time will tell...

Meanwhile, read this article in the same paper McCain's Baked Alaska to see how one American woman feels about McCain's choice.

Remember that you just have to double-click on any difficult words in the article to get a definition in English.

Who would YOU for if you were allowed to vote in this election on November 4th?

Men with Banjos Who Know How to Use Them

Steve Martin and Earl Scruggs, along with some other guys who know what to do with a banjo.




The song is a bluegrass classic called Foggy Mountain Breakdown

Here's a version featuring other instruments too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icMTVV5Lwaw

And another classic tune called "Earl's Breakdown" played first by some hillbilly
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reT_pg5s10s&feature=related


...and then by Jose Feliciano (on the guitar)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ydy_EakGfY&feature=related

Arnie's English skills

I know (some of) my students are studying for their midterm exam on Tuesday, so just in case you need to take a break from all your "learning", here are two rather amusing
links to distract you (or maybe inspire you to get back to your books immediately?!..)

http://www.isnichwahr.de/r80879022-schwarzeneggers-englishskills.html

http://growabrain.typepad.com/growabrain/schwarzenegger/index.html


and I because this video is so educational and has a cross-cultural theme I need to include it as well...
http://www.isnichwahr.de/r89237268-warum-oesterreich-nicht-gleich-deutschland-ist.html

Now enough fun already! Back to grammar and vocab!

A Wetpaint Wiki I can recommend

Tim Howe is the perfect antidote to Frank Newman.
He's started a wiki, but you won't find anything about baseball in there or other American topics.

Tim covers the British bases, so to speak.

My first impression is a positive one. Tim's wiki is brand-new and full of interesting articles, links, comments, ideas, tips, and Britishness (Tim detests Americanisms, for example).

After surfing his wiki and blog for a few minutes I came to the following conclusions:
1. He seems to be a huge fan of the Daily Telegraph.
2. He has worked as a tramslator and interpreter (German<->English)
3. He is into Brit Pop.
4. He seems to be based in Munich.
5. He has a Polish wife (to "polish" up his English, I'm sure ;-)...