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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4477 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes  Studies: German | Message 25 of 34 01 January 2014 at 4:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
BSG is great, and there is a lot of episodes to enjoy and learn from. I found it relatively hard, but I started watching it when I was B1 so it's hard to judge how hard it really is. There is a surprising lot of material for a scifi show covering broad themes like politics, religion, philosophy etc.that are all generally useful. I personally haven't found any shows where the dubbing was particularly bad. I also go the cinema here and find the dubbing is really good (even though I was a snob too about dubbing until I started learning German). In the last few months I have regularly been going to the cinema and enjoying dubbed films not only from the US, and UK, but also France, Spain, Chile etc. The whole market here revolves around dubbing, and there are only a very few cinemas you can see films in the original (forget about this in smaller towns like Magdeburg). My wife who grew up near the Dutch border, would go on school excursions to Holland, so they would watch English language films in the cinema. One thing that surprised me is that accents etc that are used to denote in English shows class etc are lost in the dubbing. The most extreme example I know is The Wire, where both blacks and whites speak in the same Hoch Deutsch. Great for learners, not so great for the shows. I really don't think there are that many good German series out there at the moment. I borrow videos from both the local video store and the library (good tip for anyone living in Germany!) here in Berlin and there aren't any German series that you can borrow, other than some episodes of Tatort at the library. There are, however, lots and lots of US shows dubbed. All successful HBO shows come out with about a 12 month delay (I'm still waiting on the last episodes of Breaking Bad, for instance). I am not sure how recent a phenomenon this is. I haven't seen older shows on offer like Star Trek, Buffy etc. So this is either a recent phenomenon or it is hard to access shows dating back more than about five years in the video store. As I said Tatort is really the classic murder-crime show dating back to the 1970s. What makes it unique is that it is filmed by different local stations across Germany (as well as Zürich and Vienna), all with their own crime teams, all with their own styles. Different people like different teams better. I like for instance Kiel and Leipzig and Vienna, all of which have darker stories, and find the Münster and Weimar teams a bit silly. You will get a lot about German culture and concerns watching the show. It's not preachy, but it does cover issues like human trafficking, crime within immigrant communities, etc; a recent show revolved around a battle in Brandenburg between a local village that didn't want a pack of wolves that had moved into the area with an environmentalist (a wolf was recently killed on the Berlin Ringbahn!). The quality varies a lot, it's certainly not a flashy CSI type affair, more old fashioned mid-budget crime procedural show that always starts with a murder and ends with the murderer being caught (something about German culture right there! I bet the French wouldn't necessarily do that.). However, as it's often hard for native speakers to know what's going on in the plot it can be hard for German learners to follow. In Berlin there are about 50 bars that show it live on Sunday evenings, and often offer beers associated with the particular city team of the week. German learning at it's best! At least here in Germany you can watch the latest episode free on ARD: http://www.daserste.de/unterhaltung/krimi/tatort/index.html Edited by patrickwilken on 01 January 2014 at 4:41pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Hungringo Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 3932 days ago 168 posts - 329 votes Speaks: Hungarian*, English, Spanish Studies: French | Message 26 of 34 01 January 2014 at 4:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I have noticed that my taste is very different from most of yours, but perhaps you might like Pumuckl. Although it is basically a children's programme I find it very funny even with my very limited German. Most episodes are on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGwtVhHd0JQ I also liked Das Erbe der Guldenburgs. Not on youtube, but you can buy it on DVD or download it from somewhere. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Erbe_der_Guldenburgs 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6541 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 27 of 34 01 January 2014 at 4:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
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| lingoleng Senior Member Germany Joined 5242 days ago 605 posts - 1290 votes | Message 28 of 34 01 January 2014 at 4:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
One of my favourite series was "Muenchner Geschichten" by Helmut Dietl. (Muenchner Geschichten) Now, as hard to believe as it may be, I am old enough to have watched the original broadcast, back in 1974, as a child and find the episodes still worth watching. The actors are excellent, it is funny and melancholic at the same time and overall a real classic, imo. (btw, the great Therese Giehse in one of her last performances as Anna Häusler should not go unmentioned.) If someone gives it a try I would love to hear what you think. (Wikipedia says that there is a DVD version, too.) Edited by lingoleng on 01 January 2014 at 6:58pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Fuenf_Katzen Diglot Senior Member United States notjustajd.wordpress Joined 4313 days ago 337 posts - 476 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Polish, Ukrainian, Afrikaans | Message 29 of 34 01 January 2014 at 7:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Here's what I did with German, but I don't necessarily think I would recommend all of what I did, because it was completely disorganized.
I was probably around an A2 level and started going to Deutsche Welle and just reading the articles there. I did a lot of the Top Thema Mit Vokabeln and learned some great vocabulary that way. Even in English I really have come to a point where I just hate reading or watching the news, so I always tried to stick to articles that were interesting to me (once I got past Top Thema I moved on to reading more health-related articles). It took about 3 months and I was much more comfortable reading and understanding than I had been. I watched several dubbed series as well. I guess I have an eclectic taste, but I watched Roseanna, Little House on the Prairie, and Charmed. The first two actually worked pretty well dubbed, although there are certain elements of the time period and social class that are lost. What I liked about those two was that the voice actors really did make an effort to do a good job, and the characters in the German versions have very different personalities from the ones in the English versions. It's really interesting how much things like voice intonation can change your impression of someone. Charmed was okay, but I don't know that I would recommend it. The acting wasn't that great in my opinion, and it was very difficult to form a "relationship" with any of the characters. In general, if you're going to do a dubbed series, I personally would stay away from "language dependent" shows (Big Bang Theory comes to mind) where a lot of the humor is based on the language itself. I've found that the equivalent either doesn't match up, or if it does, I don't know enough of the cultural context to understand the humor. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4477 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 30 of 34 01 January 2014 at 7:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
Funnily "Big Bang Theory" seems somewhat of a cult show amongst younger Germans I know in Berlin. I don't watch in personally, but I get the impression that the dubbed show is really big here. I agree with intonation. I love the film Inception, and generally thought the dubbing was great, but found the Michael Caine voice didn't match my image of the actor in anyway which distracted me. In Germany the dubbing is usually done by the same person film after film, so if you are lucky to get attached to a up-and-coming actor you can do well I think. With "language dependent shows" for me a lot the problem is not cultural context, but simply having a strong enough grasp of the language to really appreciate the subtle play of words. I suspect you need to be B2+ to really enjoy some shows that are heavily language dependent. Edited by patrickwilken on 01 January 2014 at 7:32pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4772 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 31 of 34 01 January 2014 at 9:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
Hi Bobb328, I think Tintenherz is a good choice for a learner of German - better than Harry Potter for example, for the simple reason that it's originally written in German, and as you will come to realise, if you don't already, that translations are never perfect. The German you are reading there is what the original author intended, and is not the messy compromise that a translation from English to German would have been. But what about the English translation? Isn't that a messy compromise? Yes, of course, but because it's your native language, you will be able to work out when the translation works well, and when it's a bit "lumpy", especially as you get more and more into German and gradually get behind the underlying meanings, which will take time. And your version of L-R sounds good to me. However, the main reason for my posting was to suggest something else, which is to prepare your own parallel text. I've realised since I've been doing this that I get more out of this exercise than I would simply by reading a parallel text. Doing a whole book would probably take more time than you have available, but you might try just a chapter, or even just a few pages. You need the original and a translation both in digital text form. You said you had loads of German and English e-books. Hopefully that includes some English translations of German. You can use the free Calibre software to convert the e-books to .txt files. You then need something like Aglona Reader which is some rather interesting free software. It is both a parallel book reader and can be used as an editor to create parallel books. It takes some getting used to, but once you do get used to it, it's easy to use. As I say, I'd just start with a chapter, or even just a few pages, and see how you go. The best translations for parallel books are literal ones, which average translations usually are not. So what I've been doing is re-translating as I go, trying to make it more literal (but still keeping it as grammatical English). There are a few little tricks you can use, and I'd be happy to try to help if you get stuck. You will notice that sometimes the translator has broken longer sentences into several shorter ones, or vice-versa, and what I often do then is try to put it back into the same sentence pattern as it was in the original, although that doesn't always work. I think you will find that it's a rather interesting and instructive process. Note that the value of Aglona Reader is that the text is aligned manually and not automatically. This means that it takes longer to align a text with AR than it would by some other processes, but the manual process is of benefit to both the person doing the aligning and also anyone coming afterwards just reading it. The aligner is pretty much forced to read every single sentence in both TL and NL (which is why it is not a particularly quick process, although AR does actually provide some semi- automation, but even with this, every phrase or sentence ("fragment" in the AR jargon) has to be "signed off" by a human aligner. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4953 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 32 of 34 01 January 2014 at 11:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
The Big Bang Theory is, in my opinion, one of the shows where every dubbing is much much worse than the original. While some shows have better and worse dubbings, some are just too tied to the language (in jokes, characters and their particular ways of speech and so on) that it is not worth watching them in anything else. For example, the Czech Sheldon sounds only like a worthless moron and is not funny at all. About the actors dubbing lots of films, that is exactly one of the main reasons why I mostly dislike dubbing and why I hate the Czech dubbing almost entirely. It is not fun to have hundreds of foreign actors reduced to just ten or so voices who are nowadays popular in the dubbing field. I already threw away a few shows dubbed in French because the voices were the same as those I already know too much. :-( 1 person has voted this message useful |
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