The German word Zungenbrecher translated literally means tongue-breaker. Is this an indication that tongue-twisters in German are worse than they are in English?

I'll let you evaluate that for yourself! But more seriously, tongue-twisters are a great way to practise pronunciation, particularly with sounds that are similar, or words that differ only by a letter or two. I have German tongue-twister collections for vowels and consonants.

More fun though are the tongue-twisters where a word is repeated, often with double meanings. These are called battologisms. A particularly German genre of tongue-twisters or rhymes is the Schüttelreim (shaken rhyme). These consist of pairs of lines in which the initial consonants of the last two stressed syllables in the lines are swapped, creating new words. There's some similarity with Spoonerisms here. My page of "special" tongue-twisters has a collection of almost 100 Schüttelreime and battologisms. Just don't get your tongue in too much of a knot!

Labels: german, teaching ideas, website

There's a lot of popular German music available as YouTube videos. Go to YouTube and put the name of any current band into the search box and one will find a mixture of official clips, taped TV broadcast extracts and live concert recordings. Not all legal, of course.

These videos are streamed and if one is to save them to use with a class in a room with no Internet connection, extra tools are needed. There are a few different ways of doing this, but possibly the easiest is to use the Firefox browser with the VideoDownloader extension installed. This extension puts an icon in the bottom right corner of the browser window. When one is on a webpage with a streaming video, clicking this icon opens a new window with a download button and instructions about how to name the file for FLV format. The file will now play in any FLV player software.

Another useful tool is AoA Audio Extractor for saving the sound from a video as an MP3 file.

Labels: all languages, IT tips, songs

Surveys are a popular speaking task, and in most textbooks are presented in the format of student A has a list of questions to ask student B, then student B asks the same questions of student A. If you want to collate the results for a class, it tends to be quite time-consuming.

Here's an alternative that works if you have more questions than participants. If the class size is large, or there aren't many questions, then split the class into groups.

Every student gets a strip of paper with one question and then a cloze sentence to fill in as a summary. E.g. "Did you drink fruit juice yesterday? ___ people drank fruit juice yesterday." That student needs to ask every person in the class or group, keep a record of responses and fill in the summary. The question strip is then handed in.

Even if one student is quick to finish asking their question, they will still be involved by having to answer everyone else's questions. If there are more questions than students, then the extras can be given to those who finish first. When it comes to discussing the survey results in plenum, the collation is already done!

There are other advantages to this method. Firstly, it will appeal to the students who like to move around the classroom. Secondly, if there are unknown words in the questions, the student who is in charge of the question can ask the teacher for help, and then be in a position to help the other students to understand. This cuts down on the amount of "teacher-talk" that might otherwise be required before the activity.

Labels: all languages, teaching ideas

Here in Brisbane, the lack of rain is one of the easiest conversation openers. Summer temperatures persist and any attempt at gardening is hard work. I had a passionfruit vine seedling come up in one of my few surviving herb pots and since I love eating passionfruit and the stubborn thing had resisted being eaten by the possums so far, I thought it deserved a chance to live. Digging a decent hole in clay is always hard, but when I'd made an indentation, I tipped rinse water from the washing in to soften the soil. Like putting water into a concrete bucket! An hour later, and the water level had still barely gone down. Anyway, I chipped away at it over the course of the afternoon and hopefully the pile of compost I mixed in will help the keen plant to make a go of living.

Farmers' proverbs offer us wisdom from the other hemisphere. Looking at this month's collection, this one rang particularly true: "Erst Mitte Mai ist der Winter vorbei." These pithy sayings are generally made memorable through the rhyming words in the middle and end. Apart from advising us in our farming/gardening pursuits, how can they be used in the classroom?

Pronunciation practice, analysis of rhyming syllables (particularly with different spellings, like in the example above), dictation races, cultural comparisons, vocabulary development (particularly for months and weather words), lesson openers while taking a class roll, lesson finishers if there are five minutes spare - Do you have ideas to share?

Labels: farmers' proverbs, gardening, german, inter-cultural language learning, teaching ideas, website

The Obst-Bingo game (1482KB) now opens in full!

Labels: games, german, website, what-is-new