New words

I've starting learning how to use the Natural Language Toolkit (see http://www.nltk.org/) and then started looking for corpora and other resources in German. One of the sites I found Die Wortwarte which shows the very latest in new German words. There were 20 listed today. Click on any of the words and you can see them used in context. For more resources for German than visit the ACL wiki

Wikibooks

Wikibooks ist eine Bibliothek mit Lehr-, Sach- und Fachbüchern. Jeder kann und darf diese Bücher frei nutzen und bearbeiten. Unsere Lehrbücher spiegeln bereits gesichertes Wissen wider, das heißt die hier vermittelten Kenntnisse sind in ähnlicher Form in anderen tatsächlich publizierten Werken des jeweiligen Fachs bereits dargestellt.

Do take a look at the German version of Wikibooks which has offerings across a wide range of subjects including Deutsch als Fremdsprache.

I have to say that after browsing through some of the material on Wikibooks some of it is in an early stage of development. If you feel really confident about your ability to write in German you could always make a contribution to one of the books.

TV

We spent some time in our conversation class today talking about TV viewing habits but realised none of us knew much about the full range of programmes available in Germany or which ones are popular. I'm reasonably familiar with the range of channels and I have links to many on the TV page of Jeckylls Heft What I have only just discovered is the Wikipedia Portal: Fernsehen which gives at least some of the answers we didn't have this afternoon. The main themes covered are Bezahlfernsehen – Einschaltquote – Geschichte des Fernsehens – Geschichte des Fernsehens in Deutschland – Geschichte des Fernsehens in Österreich – Fahrgastfernsehen – GEZ – GIS – Öffentlich-rechtlicher Rundfunk – Privatfernsehen – Fernsehwerbung – Medienwissenschaft.

I found the article on Fernsehwerbung instructive, particularly about the rules and limitations that apply.

A useful collection of links and information about the various broadcasters can be found at http://www.medienindex.de/ Another source I only found today is the University of Exeter's Media Index Deutschsprachige Medien im Internet which has separate sections for Fernsehen, Radio, Zeitschriften, Zeitungen. Worth exploring further I think.

Stories - Erzählungen

Could you put together a short story in German? If you think it's a little daunting then you might find advice given on wiki.zum.de helpful. Lernpfad Erzählung gives, as an example, a very short story and comments on the component parts. There are also links across the top of the page for the steps along Lernpfad Erzählung: Aufbau - Erzählperspektive - Sprachliche Gestaltung - Erzähltempora - Erzählung verfassen - Überprüfe dein Wissen

Tongue Twisters - Zungenbrecher

Playing with words is great fun and what better than a tongue twister. The Austrian schools site that I recommended for material about spring flowers also led me to some useful sources for tongue twisters in many languages. I was particularly pleased to find a wiki with a page devoted to Zungenbrecher

This also pointed to a couple of videos on YouTube.Here's one of them

Digital Learning

I've been busy in the office today setting up a simple wiki so a small group of people can work collaboratively to set up a knowledge base on social justice issues and share ideas from a Christian perspective. A wiki is just a simple web-page with an edit button so anyone who is a member can edit or add pages and leave comments. Wikis seem to be used quite a bit for groups learning languages as well so I'd love to hear from anyone with experience of using one in learning German.

There seems to be a special day for just about everything nowadays but I've just found one that I've never heard of before. Apparently 24 March is Digital Learning Day. Full details from Tag des digitalen Lernens

Die Welt von heute ist nicht die Welt von gestern und das Lernen heute ist nicht das Lernen von gestern. Arbeiten mit dem Computer findet sich in fast allen Berufen, Arbeiten mit dem Computer findet sich in nur wenigen Fächern an den Schulen. Kann das so bleiben? Wir meinen nein, denn wir haben die Aufgabe die Schülerinnen und Schüler auf die Welt von heute vorzubereiten. Wir müssen Unterricht und Schule neu denken, denn die Zeit bleibt nicht stehen.

So here is a question for you to answer when you've looked at the website: Was finden Sie wichtig und warum?