Kultur2: The Brutal Honesty of Germans

     I really enjoyed this weeks readings, when all of the blog links opened to Spiegel I became pretty excited. My friend introduced me to this website over a year ago to try and help me get started in learning German, but I've never really been able to read anything. However, in English it is extremely easy to read!

     As I was reading through these blogs I found it interesting to see how different Germany actually is than America, which I find to be weird considering around 23% of Americans have a German ancestry. As the reading about Brutally Honest: "Have You Gained Weight" states, I could not imagine telling my Grandma no if she offered me cake. At the very meanest I would say something along the lines of the second option.

     This chapter's blog does make me nervous though. I plan to go to Germany for at least one summer for an internship or to study abroad, and I do not take brutal honesty or weird "staring contests" the best. While how we Americans "beat around the bush" to avoid telling someone how we really feel does irritate me sometimes, I do not think having every single flaw about me pointed out will be enjoyable. However, I am definitely glad I read these articles before I go there because I now know what to expect and how to act.

     Another thing about Germany that these readings pointed out that I am uneasy about are all of the statistics. I do not want to have to study up on every single little detail of Germany, I do not even know all of the statistics about America, I just found out there are only around 2000 people in my hometown less than a month ago! However, I do enjoy random trivia so having a weird staring contest erupt into a spoken test might actually be enjoyable for me, even if I fail miserably. Then I can just tell the German person "Your being a jerk." straight up and not have to feel bad about it!

     From all of these readings the number one thing that kept popping into my head was the German I lived with for the first semester. I live in a house of near to 60 people, many being international students. There was one girl from Germany and she did not fit in with the other people of the house. She was way to "brutally honest" and just liked to point out flaws about people way too much, and then she also complained about everything in the house, even if there was nothing to complain about. So at first I almost believed these readings were wrote by some of my other housemates.

     The Brennpunkt Kultur readings were very uninteresting this week unfortunately. It was a nice view into the culture of Germany, but learning that there are different university names for different areas of study was just not that interesting to me, considering we have it here. For example, we have the College of Engineering, where as the Germans have die Fachhochschule. Then the German Immigration to America was already covered in last chapter's blog assignment. So the reason why it was boring was only because none of it was really anything "new" to me.