Studies | Dominik Mayer – Products, Asia, Productivity

German for Beginners: Local Prepositions

Educational Video

I was asked to give a little presentation at the Deutschkolleg. Didn’t know that they wanted to record it. Well, now “München in Bildern - Eindrücke der bayerischen Landeshauptstadt” may be used in some classes.

According to teachers many Chinese learn their presentations by heart instead of speaking freely. The video should give a good example. I hope it will.

Writing Hanzi

107 Yuan

Pizza — But very good and enough for two meals.

Artifical Language

Why don’t I learn Lojban. Seems to be so much easier than Chinese.

German Textbooks

A Chinese friend wants to learn German. I’ll help her and so I spent about an hour looking for a good textbook. Most of them teach German that might be spoken in China but certainly not in Germany.

I finally found two good ones and chose the latter because it also features a workbook and another one for listening comprehension.

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

Guided Painting

Elementary Chinese — A Korean or Japanese classmate and I had to write signs on the blackboard. He did the dozen red ones on the left side, mine are the two ones in the circles on the upper right side. The ones below show how they’re supposed to look. Not that bad. But I was guided by others. They told me exactly what to paint: A horizontal line, two vertical ones, the sign for human – large –, another line and a box on top of it.

Yes

Another attempt to communicate with a classmate. She could tell me that she’s not Japanese but Mongolian. From which city? Yes. Which language do they speak there? Yes. I said okay and gave up.

Learning German

Here’s a text from a German exam in China. It explains why Germans like women with darker skin while Chinese prefere those with a lighter tone.

But my favorite is still this dialog from a textbook:

A: Hello, Mr. Muller. B: Hello, Mrs. Krug. A: How are you? B: Good, thank you. A: Really? B: Yes, everything’s ok. A: Really? B: Yes, I am very well. A: Aha. B: Wonderful. A: Aaah. B: Yes, life is so beautiful.

Risk?

Preliminary discussion of the thesis I’ll write in China. They told me to stop the moment I think it’s getting too dangerous…

Mut

One of my professors recorded his lecture last year and instead of driving to Munich I watch these videos. One of them didn’t end with the professor leaving the room, it went on.

There were some wind players, slides with space shuttles and the solar system and then Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. mult. Wolfgang A. Herrmann, president of Technische Universität München appeared and started to talk about Prof. Bulirsch. I know that our president likes to call the university, because of its abbreviation TUM, Top University of Munich but I haven’t known that joke yet:

Und dann schließlich zurückberufen, als Ordinarius für Höhere Mathematik an die Technische Hoschschule München die damals gerade schon Technische Universität München hieß und jeder weiß mittlerweile was diese drei Buchstaben bedeuten. Von hinten rein gelesen bedeuten sie, lesen sie sich wie Mut und Mut, denke ich, für die Zukunft, können wir auch haben.
And then finally called back as full professor of higher mathematics to the Technische Hochschule München which was already called Technische Universität München at that time and by now everyone knows what these three letters mean. Read from behind they mean, they read like courage [Mut is German for courage] and courage, I think, is what we can also have for the future.