German Soap Update! - Alles Was Zählt

Since my last post this soap has been relentless in murdering its characters.  The following have all been killed off in the last couple of months:

Letizia Von Altenburg

shot in a hostage situation

Raphael Suarez

hostage taker.  Forced to commit suicide in his prison cell

Erich Schulter

fallen off (or pushed from?) a turret on his wedding day 

Antonia Fuchs

Julia Meyer

Raquel Santana

all killed in a bus crash, along with the entire student body of the Dance Factory

....so it's been a busy one!

Other than that we've had leukemia, adultery, and now yet more kidnapping.  So, always dramatic!

The big story of the moment revolves around the Steinkamp family (once more).  Maximilian, accused of murdering Erich Schulter, has been helped to escape prison by his mother, Simone.  The problem is that Maximilian is CRIMINALLY UNHINGED and has figured out the bleeding obvious: that mummy's on-off husband Richard has framed him to cover up his "accident" from his newly-widowed daughter.  Instead of leaving the country with the faked passports provided, Maximilian has taken Richard hostage.  As if Richard's history of heart complaints wasn't bad enough (surprisingly though this has not yet been mentioned), it is getting increasingly difficult to keep grieving Jenny in the dark...

Plus, Simone has figured out where he is being kept captive but in now trapped in a lift.

In other news Ben is not wasting any time (when does he ever) falling from one love into the next.  His mood fluctuates from grief at the death of his girlfriend Julia to his developing feelings for his new Bestie in Sorrow, Iva.

We have also been treated to some rather dodgy flashbacks set to the music of Take That, showing the blossoming of a young relationship that we now know to have ended in 3 years of lies, cheating and betrayal...which all feels kind of pointless really.  Oh well, I guess they had to give the new family something to do (and make up for the current lack of cast members with storylines)!

But with all this drama going on, what is the teaser for today's episode?

oh yes....Sonja getting a cleaning job!

See how foreign soaps can be fun!

Some useful vocabulary from this episode:

peinlich - embarassing

mir tut es leid - I'm sorry

grossartig - fantastic

neuer Anfang - new start

du fehlst mir - I miss you

stolz - proud

der Glückstag - lucky day

putzen - to clean

bekommen - to get

Creative Vocabulary Learning: Some Ideas

Learning vocabulary doesn't have to be about boring lists.  There are many ways that we can engage with vocabulary to make learning it more fun.

In fact, actively engaging with vocabulary makes it easier to commit to long-term memory.

In an effort to memorise the much-despised and grammatically important German noun genders I often used colours to aid my memory so that the gender would come to me in a flash, even in casual conversation.

In this way the German noun for "factory" Die Fabrik still appears in my memory as a quaint pink affair made from quilting rather than bricks (fabric - geddit?!) much like one might expect to see in a Little Big Planet game.

...so one can even engage with the mundane and the downright disgusting.  So on to our German Word of the Day:  "corpse".  Lovely.  How would we go about remembering this one?

website: Memrise.com

Fans of the film "Stand By Me" or similar could try an image association such as above.

There's also the phonetic route which has also been highlighted above, where a phrase is used to bring to mind the word and its pronunciation ("Leiche" and "like a" sound very close to one another)

Other media still could be used to anchor the vocabulary in a deeper way.  Becoming familiar with a song that utilises the vocabulary in a meaningful way is a sure-fire way never to forget a word or its meaning.  The downside: your understanding of the language would need to be more advanced for this not to be an awful lot of legwork for the benefit of remembering a single word.

Farin Urlaub Racing Team's haunting "die Leiche" tells the story of a body floating in a lake ("Leiche" and "Teich" rhyme making this easier still to remember) and how it came to be there.  A quick skim of the translated lyrics could make this vocabulary that you never forget.  Chilling, but effective!

Have fun.  Be creative!