Ich habe Deutsch gelernt

...well, level A1 at least. Now I'm going to improve my German through schlager music lessons.

This week I 'graduated' from my first intensive German course, finishing level A1 (elementary). I did pretty well on the final exam actually, so despite my fears about it being such a daunting language I think I'm doing alright. But, as I was warned, it is very challenging. 

It's been a very different experience from learning French at the Sorbonne in 2008 in Paris. For one thing, I started in July with absolutely no knowledge of German, whereas I had already taken French in high school. But even with this in mind, I found French to be a much easier language to learn because the sentence structure is quite similar.

Who wants an EU Grammy?

I’ve just been alerted via a press release to the existence of something called the “European Border Breaker Awards”, which is apparently an award show put on by the European Commission for European music acts that “cross borders”. It’s an interesting idea but taking a look at it , I think the way its structured is kind of silly. It seems to ignore a fairly obvious fact – if they were being honest about the awards, almost all of them would go to British acts.

Apparently this award show has been going since 2004, and previous winners include France’s Carla Bruni, Germany’s Tokio Hotel, Italy’s Tiziano Ferro and Benito Benasi, Sweden’s Basshunter and Britain’s The Ting Tings. This year’s awards took place last night in the Netherlands, hosted by the BBC’s Jools Holland.

Intrigued by the concept, I did a little basic esearch and found that the objective of the awards, sponsored by the Commission and the European Broadcasting Union, is to “highlight the success of 10 debuting European artists in selling albums and touring outside their home territory” to “stimulate the cross-border circulation of artists' works”.

Observing pop culture

I’ve arrived here in the UK just at the start of the fifth season of “Big Brother,” a wildly popular reality series here in the UK which I believe existed in some form at some point in the US but never really caught on.

I’ve written about the show before, me and Pierce were perplexed by it when we visited London two years ago. The premise to the series is similar to many of our reality shows, a group of people is selected to live in a house and have every moment of their lives recorded. Each week the British public decides who they would like to “save” in the house. Whoever gets the least amount of votes has to leave. And the person who’s left wins some sort of cash prize.

Sounds fairly standard right? But here’s where it gets weird. There are not one, but two “live feeds” from the house, two channels that provide two different live broadcasts of whatever is going on in the house at that exact moment, which is usually people sitting around eating or sleeping. And people actually sit around and watch this, riveted!