11. Jan '14 - The Past is Never Simple

The title is a joke on the simple past, because that's what we learned about. It's also deeply philosophical and shows my wisdom.

The Züngenbrecher returned for another round, this time with a more or less full class to very satisfying results, and there were also sugary treats and sparkling projectiles involved, both of which tend to add to the fun of an activity.

The primary lesson of the day, once we finished going over specific phonemes and how to pronounce them, was the preterit, also known as the simple past. We talked about its common usage and went over specific examples, e.g. "war" (was) and "hatte" (had).

In short:

• Some extremely common, everyday verbs are used in spoken German in their preterit form and are easily understood, e.g. "ich schwamm" or "es war....", "ich hatte..." 
• Aside from those exceptions, the preterit is used primarily in written communication, e.g. books, articles, magazines

So when speaking, someone will say, "Ich habe Wurst gegessen" whereas in a letter they may write, "Ich aß Wurst." Or, "Obama ist nach Deutschland geflogen" out loud but "Obama flog nach Deutschland" in a news article. 

Which brings us to this week's homework:

• Pick a news article from online and summarize it in at least 10 sentences. 
• This should not be a translation. I simply want a summary of it in the simple past. 
• This can be local, national, international, or even entertainment news, so long as you cite the article on the assignment so I can check for accuracy of the summary. 

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