wanderingstan

15 minutes of stardom

So I got an email on Thursday from FFN, a radiostation for Niedersachsen. They wanted to interview a "young American" about the upcoming election.

Hallo!
Mein Name ist Philipp Wedelich von radio ffn, wir haben ihre email-Adresse durch das Akademische Auslandsamt erhalten. Wir suchen junge US-Amerikaner, die derzeit in Osnabrück sind, damit wir mit ihnen ein Interview zur US-Wahl führen können. Haben sie Lust dazu?

I warned them that my German was really bad, but they gave me an invitation to the studio anyway.

It was a lot of fun to be in the station and feel--in just the smallest degree--like a celebrity, even if my only claim to fame was my choice of parents. Anyways, I think interview was a disaster. In my "normal" German conversations, I have lots of tricks to avoid using words I don't know. Hand gestures and body language, facial expressions... And German is nice in that the verb comes at the end of the sentance, so when I don't know the verb people usually have enough context to guess it and they'll fill it in for me. Of course, none of these tricks translate well to a microphone. They might be able to extract a sentence or two...we'll see!