Monday, June 25, 2012

How the cool kids talk

To prepare for a job interview a couple of weeks ago for a job that would require me to speak German (I didn't get it) and also to prepare for the trip to Basel, I got a "Perfect Your German" book-and-CD course. These things always boast "genuine German speakers" doing the talking, but one thing I realised when listening to the recording on this one is that speaking German as a first language is all well and good, but it doesn't necessarily mean the voices are good actors.

When it introduced a dialogue between two seventeen-year-olds and then came the voice of a middle-aged man exclaiming "Mensch, ich bin vielleicht froh, dass die Sommerferien morgen anfangen!" I actually laughed out loud. You can just picture a 40-year-old dressed in trendy clothing and trying to sound cool.

1 comment:

chundernuts said...

Try the Michel Thomas language courses.