I have found a show that many of you may have already discovered. It is called Extra made by the Discovery Channel. It’s pretty much like “Friends” auf Deutsch (oder Französisch, Spanisch, Englisch). It’s really funny and geared towards learners so a lot of everyday phrases are said. Tons of natural dialogues to listen to. All of the episodes can be found on Youtube.
The transcripts of each episode can be found and printed from this this link http://tiny.cc/ze2low .
Last year I’ve watched the English version with my daughter and she has liked it a lot. I guess we’ll watch the French version next year when she made some progress in French.
(If teachers just made kids watch stuff like this during lessons, answering any questions along the lines of “what exactly does X mean?”, those kids would probably come out of schools with three times as much functional knowledge in their target language.)
I’ve only watched a few of these so far but I really like this series called ‘Easy German’ where they basically go up to people on the street and interview them. They seem to ask the same basic question (e.g. what are you doing here?) so you get to hear different responses by a range of people and voices but in the same context (i.e. you get both variety and repetition). It’s not didactic at all but the idea is you’re just learning German ‘from the streets’.
I also really like that they have the main subtitles in German (as well as English - I wish more videos/movies would do this).
They seem to go around to different cities so perhaps it’s also possible try to catch different accents. It’s different to Extra in that it’s not a sitcom but I find it really watchable and for me as close as I can get to being out and about in Germany listening to regular people speak spontaneously.
It looks like there are also other German lessons in the series (as well as for many other languages) that address things like grammar etc but I haven’t watched them.
Aprende alemán deutsch aktuell subtitulado (Learn German – Current German subtitled)
This is one continuous video a little over an hour and a half long:
Thanks everyone,
Does anyone know of French resources? There seems to be a plethora of German materials, the best by far being Deutsche Welle, (what an amazing website) but I’m concentrating more on French. Of course, there is TV5 Monde but it’s more the sitcom or telenovela style for beginners-intermediate that I’m really looking for. Any ideas?
PS @ debbielim & donhamiltonx - Have you checked out “Jojo sucht das Glück” by DW? It’s really, really good !!
Thank you for sharing, I can actually understand most of it. It’s a nice change of pace haha.
This is a great link for popular videos on YouTube in Germany
My favorite is probably is Simon Desue. Er ist sooo lustig.
