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Level D1 on the CEFR | ||
Tags: Native Fluency | CEFR Language Levels | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5144 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes  Speaks: Spanish* | Message 17 of 50 25 March 2011 at 9:15pm | IP Logged | ||
So "Dumpfmucke" is actually a musical genre? This coupled with the other fact you mention about Carmen's identity makes the sentence clear, closer to my second interpretation. I had first assumed Carmen Nebel was an author and that the article discussed literature! Edited by Juаn on 25 March 2011 at 9:30pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6269 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 18 of 50 25 March 2011 at 9:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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Meant to do this as an edit, but you were too fast...
In my initial post I already explained that this is about the band Unheilig, who jumped onto the dark/Gothic bandwagon. Their singer is often referred to as "Graf" Unheilig and the entire article is dissing them for selling banal happy-happy texts while keeping up a mysterious, dark aura like the real Gothic bands.
die Unterwelt = Hades, the netherworld. "unterweltlich" is an adjective for that. In this sentence, it takes the place of "unterirdisch". "unterirdisch" means "subterranean" and is also used for really low quality - as in, ground level means zero quality, and anything "unterirdisch" is actually less than that. "unterweltlich" is nicely chosen because the writer wants to imply both that it's low quality and that the music is of the Gothic variety (Gothic music has a fascination with death etc). "Mucke" is slang for "music". "dumpf" means "muffled, hollow, dull" or figuratively also "stupid" (as in "Dumpfbacke") - again a word that suits both the sound of the music and the author's bad opinion of it. "Dumpfmucke" is NOT a genre and I believe it's an ad-hoc neologism. bemühte Pseudoüberraschungen = somebody trying to pass something off as a big surprise when it actually isn't a surprise to anyone; think of a moderator in a mediocre circus for example. Carmen Nebel moderates Volksmusik shows on TV (and the author votes for putting Unheilig in the Volksmusik drawer rather than Gothic), but this doesn't matter much to the understanding of the sentence. das Gemüt = mind, character, human nature ein schlichtes Gemüt = simple natured / simple minded die Gnade des schlichten Gemüts = thank the simple-mindedness (of the singer or his listeners or both?). This also immediately brought former chancellor Kohl's "Gnade der späten Geburt" to my mind because the expression is so seldomly used. All in all: You have simple-mindedness to thank for the success of this extremely bad, dark-themed thudding music. It was not something to be expected, unlike Carmen Nebel's so-called surprises. EDIT: What makes this particularly difficult for language learners is not so much the cultural background but the fact that the writer often conveys two meanings with one word. For example also "Unheimeliges" = reference to "unheimlich" (eerie) and the opposite of "heimelig" (homey). "Elektroschrott" = reference to electronic music as a genre and "Schrott" (garbage) - "Elektroschrott" is also a regular German word meaning broken computers or the like that you can't dispose of with the regular trash. "volksdümmlich" = reference to "volkstümlich" (folkloric, generally referring to Volksmusik) and "dumm" (stupid) Edited by Sprachprofi on 25 March 2011 at 9:55pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| LLF Groupie United Kingdom Joined 5379 days ago 66 posts - 72 votes Speaks: English* | Message 19 of 50 25 March 2011 at 9:34pm | IP Logged | ||
Well, I'm not at all sure; I'm hoping Sprachprofi will clarify things. But I think that it's very clear that the main difficulty here is not linguistic but cultural. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| LLF Groupie United Kingdom Joined 5379 days ago 66 posts - 72 votes Speaks: English* | Message 20 of 50 25 March 2011 at 9:42pm | IP Logged | ||
I'll have to think about examples in English of this kind of text, but for me, the Burroughs passage is almost incomprehensible. It seems to be written in some kind of (invented?) street lingo, which Americans may be able to decipher, but this Brit certainly can't. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5492 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 21 of 50 26 March 2011 at 12:52am | IP Logged | ||
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I think there's an interesting difference between the two examples I posted. The first one, I don't have much trouble understanding. I've studied the culture surrounding Burroughs and his fellow weirdos ("weirdos" used here as a term of endearment, I swear) enough to be able to get the grasp of his lingo. He's obsessed with the subculture of heroin addicts, so much of that passage (and indeed the whole book) refers to "junk" as he calls it. Drug slang in any language is a particular set of vocab words which non-native speakers probably won't learn unless they purposely seek it out, or if they hang out with that sort of people. This is also drug slang of a specific time period, which makes it slightly more opaque. Then of course there's just his own craziness, for which I won't make any excuses. :)
The James sentence, I'll confess, threw me for a loop. I get the gist of it, but it gives me a headache. Sprachprofi, I infer from your comment that it was easier for you than the first excerpt. I was actually guessing that might be the case, seeing as Germans are accustomed to long and involved sentences with many clauses all strung together. ;) I found a quotation from the author P.D. James (no relation, as far as I know) saying that where other writers bite off more than they can chew, Henry James chews more than he bites off. That's it in a nutshell, for me! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| noriyuki_nomura Bilingual Octoglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 5139 days ago 304 posts - 465 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, Japanese, FrenchC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, SpanishB2, DutchB1 Studies: TurkishA1, Korean | Message 22 of 50 26 March 2011 at 12:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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On another note, having a D1 level could be useful for those who are interested to pursue the study of 'linguistics' of a particular language, say, at the university level, and without having to attend lessons at the university. This is especially beneficial especially to working adults who might not want to attend classes, but prefer to study on their own (well, there are some of us who study languages on our own and went on to take and pass the language proficiency exams such as DALF, CELI etc). Besides, most online linguistics courses are so expensive....
That's just a thought though :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| janababe Triglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 5313 days ago 102 posts - 115 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, German | Message 23 of 50 26 March 2011 at 12:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've always found the A1 - C2 scale confusing because A1 sounds loads better than C2! A1 sounds like you're the best, and as for C2, that's more like you've failed. Give me an A1 anyday ;)
As for D.... that sounds even worse! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| noriyuki_nomura Bilingual Octoglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 5139 days ago 304 posts - 465 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, Japanese, FrenchC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, SpanishB2, DutchB1 Studies: TurkishA1, Korean | Message 24 of 50 26 March 2011 at 1:10pm | IP Logged | ||
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However, level D can mean Diploma level too ;)
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