English has become second nature and STAR TREK in language learning

There was a discussion about Russian and/or Ukrainian language and it came to the topic of Star Trek in language learninge. Mikebond wished that people should stick with the topic, and I’ve to respect this. Therefore I opened this thread to answer David.

@David (djvlbass): There are Star Trek fans in Germany too, and I’ve to admit that our family loves Star Trek. We’ve started two or three years ago watching all Star Trek series with my daughter. And last Sunday we started with the most recent series “Enterprise”.

I’ve to admit that we watch it in German because the English of my daughter and Jürgen isn’t good enough to switch to English.

By the way, when they speak “Klingon” there were subtitles. Funny enough I haven’t noticed that they were in English unless my daughter made me aware of this :slight_smile: I read and listen a lot to English during the day that I sometime don’t notice when something is in English. Sometimes I find myself thinking about a letter I’ve to write, and I phrase it in English instead of German

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P:S. Feel free to speak about everything you like in this thread. Use it like a chatroom :wink:

“Sometimes I find myself thinking about a letter I’ve to write, and I phrase it in English instead of German”

I know what you mean. I have a few times phrased English sentences in German. Anyway, where do I become some of this German dubbed Star Trek?

ebay.de, amazon.de, weltbild.de, mediamarkt.de etc. You have to look carefully which languages are included. There are different versions.

@Vera

So what is the German for “beam us up, Scotty”?

Do you say “beam uns auf, Scotty”, or is there something else?

(This is an important phrase, I find. We never know when we might go through a time-warp and find ourselves in deep space nine…! :-D)

“beam uns auf, Schotty”

“beam uns hoch, Scotty” or “beam uns rauf, Scotty” bzw. “beam uns runter, Scotty” bzw. einfach “Energie” :wink:

“beam uns auf” doesn’t work but “beam uns auf die Oberfläche” would work. “Auf” is a preposition and needs an object.

Sometimes you can hear: “Ich kann sie nicht erfassen. Das Signal ist gestört” or “Ich hab sie!” or “Ich habe sie verloren!”

Beaming is a really cool technology :wink:

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Thanks Vera! This will be very useful the next time that I visit “…a galaxy far far away”…:wink:

(Or is that Star Wars…? :-D)

As a new German student, I am very happy to hear that Star Trek is well liked in Germany ! Are you saying you have watched every series from the original Star Trek ? No wonder it took you two or three years :stuck_out_tongue:

I can definetly see what you’re talking about. In listening to my two languages, I sometimes have to stop for a moment and ask myself ‘what language is this?’ I rarely listen to English these days, but when I do it feels really weird. Its a bit like the feeling you get when you go home from an extended trip abroad. Everything appears exactly like what now seems to be a distant memory; there is an unsettling normality and comfort.

Pretty much the only English I write these days is on this forum, and I feel much less comfortable than I think I would have before I started spending so much time on my French. I feel like my phrases are disjointed and I’m never sure if the word I am writing is real.

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…a galaxy far far away is Star Wars. Geez.

@David: We’ve started with the Enterprise Original followed by Next Generation and Deep Space Nine and finished Voyager last week. And yes, we’ve watched each episode. Not to forget the movies …

@Shaun: Jürgen and I’ve seen all Star Wars episodes as well but my daughter favorites Star Trek. I’m not sure what will become the next series on our list.

DS9 is the best I think.

Next? Firefly. Then Battlestar Galactica (the new one). Then tackle Stargate

Some folks like Babylon 5. However, some of those folks–and by ‘some of those folks’ I mean me–think almost all of the first season was very dull. But whether Babylon 5 is auf Deutsch I do not know.

@Veral “Beaming is a really cool technology.” German engineers invented mp3 technology, so I expect them to perfect transporting in just a few years.

I know Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, Stargate and Babylon 5. They are all dubbed in German. Otherwise most series would not have success on German television. There are more and more young adults who watch series in English but most Germans speak English not well enough (or not at all) and prefer the German version.

Personally my favorites are Stargate and Firefly. I don’t understand why there is only one season from Firefly and a movie. I think Battlestar is to dark for a child in my opinion. Babylon 5 is ok if you’ve made your way through the first season. I’m not sure about our choice but now we will watch the second episode of Enterprise :slight_smile:

@Don: I’m sure we’re working on it. But we have to keep it secret. The NSA is watching us :wink:

Firefly was originally aired by Fox… which apparently at the time was (or still is maybe… I don’t watch TV) ran by complete idiots. Millions of fans begged Fox to continue the series… but no luck. At least they decided to wrap it up with a movie.

Okay how about:

Sliders
Quantum Leap
MacGyver

My Swiss coworkers found it quite funny we have an American “hero” (MacGyver for those who know know) who build anything with a little swiss army knife, some duct tape, and a pack of matches

@Veral ¨But we have to keep it secret." Ah, now I understand. Once completed, you can use it to beam NSA up.

I’d like to write some words about the “teleportation” or “beaming” (as it is called in Star Trek), which interests me a lot. Believe me or not, but It’s actually already possible to transmit information from one point to another without any time delay by dint of the - very weird - phenomenon called “quantum entanglement” (in German: Quantenverschränkung). Some Austrian scientists demonstrated it on the Canary Island (look here: Quantenverschränkung: Forscher teleportieren Licht über 143 Kilometer - DER SPIEGEL). The entangled photons are able to communicate with each other without any time lag, even if the distance would add up to billions of light years. Up to now, it’s still not possible to “transfer” material, but with this method it might - theoretically - be conceivable one day. But in the strict sense, and these are the bad news, it wouldn’t really be a transfer of the matter, but exclusively of the containing information. That means, the thing/creature/human being would have to be destroyed and rebuild in another place. This brings up another question: would this be the same creature/person/thing or just a soulless copy?! Of course, in order to decode and gather the information of one single human being, we would need a super computer (some million or even billion times more efficient than the ones of today). Well, to be honest, I wouldn’t feel very comfortable being disintegrated into the tiniest particles we are made of and being copied in another place (which possibly wouldn’t be me). :-))

@Melomane

I’m just going to assume that our resident mad scientist Colin is involved with this Austrian photon entanglement. He is in Austria, and he is a physicist so logic says that this must be the case.

I am sorry to disappoint, but I am not involved with this project. The project is run by Anton Zeilinger, who is a really well known physicist in the German speaking world. He works at the Department of Physics at the University of Vienna, whereas I am at the Department of Astrophysics, at the same university. He did come over earlier this year and give an interesting talk about this project on the Canary Islands for us.

@Melomane “…and these are the bad news, it wouldn’t really be a transfer of the matter, but exclusively of the containing information. That means, the thing/creature/human being would have to be destroyed and rebuild in another place. This brings up another question: would this be the same creature/person/thing or just a soulless copy?!..”

This is extremely interesting. It seems fairly obvious to me that the person would be, precisely, a soulless copy.

It reminds me of a TV interview that I once saw with some fruitcake who was claiming that, in future, the contents of a person’s brain could be “scanned” and then “downloaded” onto the brain of a cloned copy of that same person’s body - thereby allowing the person to regenerate every 70 years or so!! :-0

Of course, even the Ancient Greeks already understood that there is an indefinable essence to each individual human being which is separate from body and mind. I think they called it η ψυχε (which I’m probably spelling wrong!) or the ‘psyche’ as we would perhaps say.

It seems to me that a very good definition of this ‘soul’ or ‘psyche’ is that which would be lost when the original human would be destroyed - even if there were an apparently a perfect copy at the end.

So in theory, you could scan my brain, kill the old me, and then download the brain-contents onto a lab-created clone. It might look like me, sound like me, have the same memories as me, etc, etc. The only little problem is: it wouldn’t be me! :slight_smile: