Wild boar cause chaos in Germany

I read this article below in Metro the other week and thought it was too weird not to tell you about.

Germany builds fake wild boar to see effect on cars when in accidents

Read the article at Metro.co.uk

Apparently wild boar (Wildschweine) are more of a problem in Germany than I realised. Take this article for example. It would be an interesting one to translate for your scrapbook, too.

Loveparade

The Love Parade held in Duisburg, Germany was the biggest dance music festival in Europe, but this year it ended in tragedy as 19 people died and hundreds were injured.

Here are some German news reports covering the incident.

Welt-Online

Bild.de

deutsche Welle

Lost in Deutschland

So what would be the first thing you notice when you visit Germany? For Brian Melican it was the amount of television towers.

Brian has put together a series of off-the-wall posts about the German way of life, which is unlikely to be understood at first glance by us Brits.

Lost in Deutschland is very informative and very funny.

Radio fuer Kinder

It might seem a little childish, suggesting that you watch/listen to news, which is written for and by children, but the nice thing with these articles is that as you listen to the news, you can read along.

From the homepage, you will find loads of options:

Radio hoeren - listen to the radio
Nachrichten - listen to and read the news
Wissen - listen to and read about science
Spielen - test your knowledge with a quiz

ZDFtivi

I haven't had much time to check this out, but at a first glance this looks like a great website. Follow the link for up-to-date news stories aimed at teenagers.

Happy reading!

Exercise: How to understand the German news!

You can pick-up a lot of useful vocab of recent events by watching the German news.
However, it’s not always easy to understand the news.
Here is an exercise that might help you to improve your skills:

Go to the Tagesschau website and pick an interesting video from the recent Tagesschau or from the archive. Then watch the news and try to take notes about the “5 W-Fragen” (wer, was, wann, wo and weshalb) using this sheet.

After watching the news and taking notes you can compare your notes with the written news in English.

You could for example start with watching this video “Former Deutsche Post boss avoids jail for tax fraud” from the 26.01.2009, 22:15h and compare your notes with this article.

German TV news in 100 seconds

ZDF is a popular German TV channel and you can watch a 100 second news summary online. Don't worry if you don't understand everything to begin with, if you follow the news in this country, some of the stories will already be familiar.

CLICK HERE to visit ZDF.