austauschschueler.de Forum

I don´t know if we are allowed to start writing in the Abitur. My teacher always taught us to use this time thoroughly but said if we want to we can start writing (I also had her in year 7-10). Now, I just make my notes which takes about 20 minutes or 25 minutes already. So I guess I will definitely need this in the Abitur as well.

OH you have to do a translation? That sounds cool, but I am not really good at it. If I had more practice I am sure I would be able to do this as well. Actually, I would like to try that. But I think we have to do enough already, it´s really quite a lot even though we don`t have a translation part in it.

Yeah, of course it's a lot, but we have all the parts you have plus the translation and obviously we have half an hour less time... And if you don't know a word in English you can look it up in the bilingual dictionary, which we could never do (although I just guessed what the word could mean and looked it up in the monolingual dictionary then ). But we get more specified questions (instead of, like, 3 questions we get 6, so in fact we have to do an analysis but get more hints than you do). The length of the texts is about the same, and the translation can be okay, if the guy who made it is not a fan of Arthur Miller . Usually we had to translate the Times or something like that. In my year it was about Darwin, I think from The Guardian...

Yeah I understood that.
My teacher gives us questions like these (quoted from my last exam):

1.Comment:
Outline the arguments put forward in the article against having a baby with a "Designer disability".
2.Analysis:
Wat is the tone of the article?Explain how Jeanette Winterson conveys her strong disagreement with what she calls "genetic imperialism" throughout the text.
3.Comment:
In 2001, Jeremy Rifkin, author of The BIotech Century, and president of The Foundation on Economic Trends in Washington DC, said "In our desire to become the architects of our own evolution, we risk the very real possibility of losing our humanity". In your debaing club at school, you are asked to give talk on the pros and cons of genetic enginerring. Use the above quotation as an initial thesis for your talk.

Well, I don´t know in how far, but I think our taks always say what we have to do but it only gives a tiny hint on what we have to focus on and when we see our Erwartungshorizont there are always a lot more things, than the tone and genetic imperialism in this case.I don´t think the tasks are too precise and therefore leaves much space in how you interprete it and if this isn´t given in the Erwartungshorizon, that´s what I call bad luck.
I mean I don´t have that problem but there were people who said that the tone of this article we had was rather positive even though the task said that "her strong disagreement".Wer lesen kann ist klar im Vorteil. But what I wanted to say is that I would sometimes wish fore taks that are just a little more precise than what we already have.
I think a Comment/Speech is always very vague because you could write anything and of course there is a lot that counts but it still has to be well connected, refer to the article/text and then you still have to find a logical conclusion for everything.

Well, I would really love to try a translation part but as we don´t have to do that I guess I will have to do that at Uni anyway, when I want to become a teacher. How long is your translation part then and what would your questions look like? More precise or even less precise? I mean that´s only what my teacher does I don´t know about the Abitur but I think it must be about the same.

Questions like this can come up, but it would be one of the questions you have to write more about, i.e. you would be awarded 20 credits which means you would have to write about 1-1,5 pages.


A question like this would be likely to come up, too, but I think it would rather come across as two questions, so one question would be the first part (tone) and the rest would be the 2nd part. For the first part you would be awarded about 10-15 credits, I think, and 20 for the second one because you would have to use lots of quotations, justifications etc.
In the Abi you would on the whole get two or three questions more, then.


Well, the comment could be in that style, of course, but it could also be a lot more open-ended. On the whole we get 3 or 4 comment topics, so you're always able to choose how open-ended you want the question to be . You could also be asked to comment on a cartoon. The comment always refers to the topic of the text, but not directly to the text.


That's possible, that's why I think it's good that we have to do it at school.


For the questions, I think I already explained that.
The translation is about 200 words in English, which means that you get a lot more words in German . You find an example (Abi 2005) here: http://www.spiegel.de/media/0,4906,11792,00.pdf, the translation for the non-fictional text is absolutely terrible, nobody in my course (we did it for practice, my Abi was in 2006) would have got nearly the 50 marks, everybody was about 25, and I usually got 40 or more, so I was shocked . But it's not always that bad, the one for the fictional text is much better.

Thank you, I will have a look at the text later then.

Well, the first task is not only listing the arguments, we also have to write like 1-1,5 pages, that´s what I normally do and I mostly I gett full marks. For the second one we also have to use quotations of course, I mean it´s an analysis, so you should use them.I think in the Abitur we get two options for the third part but my teacher always gives us one, only. But most of the times I like her taks for the comment. I am rather struggeling with the analysis, because I always consider the wrong things to be important.

But altogether, I can´t complain about my grades and I love my teacher.

Yeah, I didn't mean to say that you don't have to do all this stuff, I just wanted to state clearly what I had to do . We usually got two or three options for the comment thing.

No problem, I didn´t take this as an offense I was just thinking that I didn´t say clearly what we have to do before.

Ah, I am sooooo damn pissed off because me 3 week old notebook doesn´t work anymore. Well, I will just hope for the best get my make up sorted now (I hate that I always have to cry when I am mad) and thn study Maths.

hehe, I don't even know what we are to do in our final exams. Mmmh, I'll see I guess. I don't really worry bout my English exam. Might be a mistake

Ah Laura, I feel with you. My laptop kinda pretended to not be able to boot/launch anymore and it kept showing me that "error message". I was so horrified, I mean basically EVERYTHING is on that laptop (well not anymore, I've got an external hard drive now with all my important things on it).
One day it was all just sorted, though. (I think I pressed some certain kind of button, dont really know anymore^^).

Well, after talking to a man at the service hotline, make an new installation of Windows 7 it finally works again. It took me and my Dad ages to get all the stuff reinstalled. The man at the service hotline said, my things probably won´t be deletet as we didn`t convert the Festplatte or something. Still, I was sooooo damn scared because my whole life is on that damn thing. All my memories from England, school stuff that I want to keep and a lot of other stuff as well. The neyt thing I will get is one of those external hardwares as well.

Luckily everything turned out good. The worst was that I just got it like 3 weeks ago and teh man also thought that the hardware might have been broken. Lucky,lucky, lucky meeeee!

for the spiegel abitur link; are both texts translation texts, or what is the exact question?

sorry for ignoring your quite interesting discussion but i've got a question.
well me and my friends find it funny to drive our english teacher nuts. we arent supposed to speak german in class so we get warnings and if there are too many you'll have to bake a cake. whatever.. do you guys know german words that are also used in english? so far i have
gesundheit
doppelganger
schadenfreude
kindergarten
schnitzel aaaand
bratwurst

thank you for answering my question

Blitzkrieg
(to) abseil
Autobahn
Lebensraum
Dummkopf
Kitsch
Wunderkind
Weltschmerz
Waldsterben
Gemütlichkeit
Reich
Sturm und Drang
Strafe
Weltanschauung
Zugzwang
Eisberg
Meister

well, u can google "50 german stars" or sth like that.. did some project about that!

A student I'm tutoring in English has got an English book in which a poltergeist is the "star".
I first thought it might be a joke but "poltergeist" is definitely an English word (I looked it up in a dictionary).

thank you so much, I'm excited for tomorrow's English class

I also thought of Zeitgeist, Krauts, Sauerkraut ..

Lederhosen.. Doppelgänger haha

Yeah, i was reading Harry Potter in english and all of a sudden it said "Poltergeist" and "Doppelgänger" haha
I was really confused at first