My interwebs search for irgendetwas auf Deutsch continues. Before I left for vacation, I found a site called maxdome that's like a pay-per-view thing full of content, both German TV shows and American shows dubbed over in German. You pay 1 Euro/episode to get a jump on everybody else and watch next week's shows, or to watch archival stuff more than a week old. BUT it looked like anything that aired that week in Germany was free to watch for that week. So there was a lot of free content - jackpot!
I registered for an account, loaded the particular reader needed onto my computer - but it still didn't work. Geoblocked (copyright issue that blocks users from outside of the source country). Curses!
But then I came home from vacation to discover that Sat1/ProSieben took the geoblock off one of their daily soaps, Hand Aufs Herz. It's kind of like Glee, in that it's about students and teachers at a high school in Koeln (Cologne), specifically students involved in the singing and dancing activity group (the S.T. AG). But it's also not like Glee in that they don't sing as many songs per episode and they cover darker themes (a couple non-S.T. AG students recently caused an accident in which two teachers died and one of them is having a very dark night of the soul about it).
It's a soap, but I watch American soaps, and this one puts 22 solid minutes of German in my ear every day. And it's working - I'm learning new vocab and surfacing old vocab buried in the recesses of my mind, I'm understanding more and increasingly catch myself thinking to myself in German.
But the way I can really tell that it's working? Last night I dreamt in German. Not completely, it was a mash-up going back and forth between German and English. But I haven't dreamt in German in a looonnnggg time.
So, just want to publicly thank Sat1/ProSieben for removing the geoblock and providing material to help me get my German back in shape. If anybody else is looking to brush up their Deutsch, you can watch the current weeks whole episodes for free here.
1 comment:
Maybe they are just letting you have a few episodes to get you hooked.
Try this site. It lists 99 channels of streaming video for Germany. It's hit and miss which ones work at any particular time. There is also some channels in Switzerland like Zürich and Schweiz 5, Austria, and one in Luxemburg which is airing Sonndesmass at the moment.
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