AMD 4 - Jenna Malzahn

Für AMD 4, habe ich zu Deutsch Menschen auf Florida zugehört. Over spring break I traveled down to Naples, Florida where there happened to be a surprising amount of German tourists as well. It seemed that for the majority of the week I was surrounded with German speakers because they were honestly everywhere, including the beach, pier, and downtown shopping area. It became a fun game that my friend and I played in trying to casually eavesdrop and understand what they were talking about. Assuming that they were all natives speakers it was usually incredibly difficult trying to understand and comprehend what they were conversing about and we were often left with only an inkling of a guess from the words that we picked up. The most common were "das Wetter", "heiß", "der Wellengang", "einkaufen", und "die Kleidung". Other words that we caught but couldn't decipher we tried to look up and that list included the word for dolphin "die Delfine", painting "das Gemälde", und jewelry "der Schmuck". Towards the end of the week I did feel more confident in my abilities to decipher and understand what was generally being talked about in German between the tourists, as it became easier to follow along with their fast-paced conversing in relation to the slow-paced videos we usually hear in class. The fact that my friend and I also decided to try to mostly converse with each other in only German helped substantially as well because it focused my mind on the German language more and how to communicate through what I have learned so far. Our conversations were on the more basic side, usually spanning from the weather to shopping for clothes but it was extremely rewarding to hold a conversation for a while and I feel like it helped a lot in my ability to retain what we have learned.