Berliner

February 20, 2008 By 1 Comment

Berliners are a form of doughnut, often filled with jam.

The story of their invention is possibly only a legend, but it is said that they were created by a baker from Berlin who was trying to create something that could be cooked on a battlefield without an oven. He placed the balls of dough into hot fat to create the form that we know today.

The Konditorberliner in Hessen are normally filled with raspberry jam, but at carnival time there are Berliners without jam, with strawberry jam, iced, with coffee or even alcohol creams in them.

Other words for Berliner are: Krapfen, Kreppel and Fastnachtsküchle.

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Filed Under: Carnival, Food & Drink, German Words Explained, Podcasts Tagged With: ,

Blu-ray v HD-DVD – just another format battle?

February 19, 2008 By 2 Comments

Today’s news shocked me at first: Toshiba has effectively conceded defeat for the HD-DVD format and Blu-ray is the winner.

It was a battle that, although it had interested me, was not one that I was going to let affect me. I am currently quite happy with the DVD standard for video and data, and although it’s interesting to see where the technology is going, I already see enough problems with the DVD subformats to worry too much about any new ones.

That said, I am worried that in the not too distant future, we will not be able to read the DVDs that we write today.

When I got married I archived all of the digital pictures on a CD and gave copies of this CD to our relatives. One of my friends asked me if I was sure that I would always be able to read them. At the time I thought that the CD format was pretty much standardised, and the pictures were in JPEG format – something that I couldn’t see dying out too quickly.

And yet now I find myself really wondering if I will be able to read the CDs in 10 or 20 years time. What will come after Blu-ray? Will the drives read the ‘old’ CDs? Or will reading a CD then become like reading a disc today.

Actually I still use 3.5″ discs as one bank that I deal with accepts DTA files on them. I also use one when I want to print flyers at the local copyshop.

So currently I find myself using 3.5″ discs, CDs and DVDs for my data, not to mention my USB stick and the SD card in my PDA and the MMC card in my mobile phone.

Is Blu-ray going to be just another format to add to the list?

I remember the VHS/Betamax time at the beginning of the 1980s – the current discussion has often been compared to this. At home we had VHS, at school Betamax. At least one person I knew had betamax at home, but everyone else had VHS – and eventually my school changed as well. Whatever happened to those betamax recorders?

The fact is, that I still use VHS cassettes. Yes, I can record a DVD instead, but when I want to play it somewhere else there are always compatibility questions: is it +R, -R, +RW, or -RW? Has the last session been closed? These two simple questions determine whether or not I can watch my recording on other equipment. VHS does not, normally, have this problem (although I did once have an SVHS recorder…)

Will Blu-ray bring the compatibility that VHS once did?

Filed Under: Cymeradwyo, Hardware Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Learning to speak a language – and be tested on it

February 19, 2008 By Leave a Comment

I remember when GCSEs were first introduced – I myself was in the first year to take them for mathematics, and the second year for other subjects such as languages. The idea was to put more emphasis on being able to do something, than being able to be tested on it.

So in languages more effort was put in being able to speak a language and make yourself understood, and a little bit less was put into writing it and the grammar – something that my university would later complain about.

So the idea that pupils should no longer have oral examinations on these subjects is a bit worrying – for me it seems like another step back from leaning the language thoroughly.

I don’t remember that much about my GCSE oral exams, but I remember that certain situations had to be prepared and you learnt a lot of set phrases at the time. I do, however, clearly remember my A-level German oral exam (which I got an ‘A’ in 🙂 and it was maybe stressful, but it was a positive experience to come out of the exam and to be able to say that I had managed to keep going in German for the entire duration.

So why get rid of this part of the exam process?

There is nothing to be gained in my opinion from only having the spoken skills assessed – as at the first opportunity in the workplace these skills may really be tested.

I used to interview students coming to Germany for placements here – and I carried out the interviews in German.

Of course, having been through the system myself, I had an advantage over a native speaker in that I knew what vocabulary a student would or would not know, and could as such make the interview easy or difficult.

In fact, it was not only important to be able to speak German, but to have the confidence to do it!

I gained a lot of confidence in my A-level oral exam – and a lot more on subsequent trips to Germany when I sometimes had no alternative but to explain myself in German.

Please don’t take this confidence booster away from today’s schoolchildren!

Filed Under: Cymeradwyo

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