Alles Gute zum Geburtstag! German Birthdays

With GLO turning two, I thought I'd do a post on birthdays - I've created a list of sites so you can know what to say, learn German birthday customs, and even send free birthday e-cards in German!

Birthday Greetings / Vocabulary:

• Birthday Words in German (For Kids), LittleExplorers.com
• Congratulations in German, About.com
• Geburtstagssprüche, Geburtstagswünsche und Sprüche zum Geburtstag, Sprueche-zum-Geburtstag.de (In German)
• Happy Birthday in German, About.com
• How to Say "Happy Birthday" in German, Youtube.com
• How to Wish Happy Birthday in German, Suite101.com

Birthday Songs & Customs:

• Birthday Celebrations from Germany, BirthdayCelebrations.net
• Birthday Customs in Germany, About.com
• Happy Birthday (German Version), Youtube.com
• Happy Birthday Songs in German, About.com
• Childen's Birthday Parties in Germany, About.com
• German Birthdays, About.com
• Wie schön, dass du geboren bist, Youtube.com (Get the lyrics here.)

More:

• E-card: Alles Gute zum Geburtstag!, About.com
• Alles zum Thema Geburtstag, Geburtstag-ABC.de (In German)
• Geburtstag: Gedichte, Texte, Spiele, Lieder, Spaß, Festpark.de (in German)
• Hallmark.de: Geburtstag ecards (Free e-cards, some in German)
• Kisseo.de: Grußkarten kostenlos verschicken Kisseo.de (Free e-cards, in German)

Deutsch-Online-Lernen.com

Deutsch-Online-Lernen.com is the companion website to the Youtube German course DeutschOnlineLernen, reviewed by me in my last blog post. The site is created by Thomas P. Birkhoff.

BBC - Languages - German

You already know the "What's so funny about German?"  videos from previous posts, but the BBC website's language-learning section has a ton of other resources for learning German, especially for beginners!

The homepage is here: BBC - Languages - German. (Click here to get a BBC Languages newsletter.) A lot of the material is based on BBC TV shows, but you don't need to have watched the show to use or understand the materials!

Website: LanguageGuide.org

A review of German resources on the "Language Guide" website.
The homepage is at: http://languageguide.org/; the German page is at: http://languageguide.org/deutsch/.

This site is basically a pictorial dictionary for vocabulary. You are shown a collection of clip-art like pictures on a page. When you hover over the picture with your cursor, the German word appears in a floating box and you have audio of a native speaker saying the word.

"Is German threatened by the English language?"

Listen to the BBC News - Radio 4 "Today" show's July 29th interview with Uwe Rau of the Goethe Institute on whether German is being threatened by the English language. (Clip is about 2 minutes long).

Listen here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8866000/8866495.stm

"The Awful German Language"

By Mark Twain. A humorous look at the German language.

Some long German words.

In 1880, Mark Twain wrote the novel A Tramp Abroad, a humorous account of his experiences traveling through central and southern Europe. In preparing for his travels, Twain started studying German. As an appendix to the book, he wrote the essay “The Awful German Language,” which comically explores the difficulties and troubles of the German language for anyone trying to learn it.

Twain pokes fun at, among other things, the way the German language uses gender and the length of some German words.