Language difficulty in German TV

[timwilde]

Hi,

I noticed something recently. I've been watching the TV show Alarm für Cobra 11 for a little while now. I can pick up enough of the dialogue to be able to follow the story, if not know all the finer details of what's said.

In contrast, one of my friends just bought me an import dvd set of Stromberg(Staffel 4). That show I can only pick up very few words through the entirety of the show. Is this a dialect issue or do the shows just have that much different of a vocabulary? It almost seems like the characters in Stromberg tend to mumble or slur thier words most of the time.

[Pandachan6228]

uh~ you picked a really hard one. Stromberg is not very easy to understand... I think it's because they often speak all at once and use colloquial speech... and yeah~ Stromberg really is mumbling^^"

[timwilde]

Awesome! So it's not just me

[Pandachan6228]

yep~
It's also that they start a new sentence, when they didn't finished the old one yet...
Like this one (it's from stromberg season 1):

Ulf, jetzt ist das hier alles wieder... guck dir das doch mal an... das ist jetzt alles... das ist Verhinderung von Arbeitszeit!

Ulf, now all of this is again... look at this... that's all... that's a prevention of working time!

And they are talking very fast without having time to breath.... So it's really hard to figure out what they really mean (if it means something at all)...
And if you have to watch one scene over and over again just for understanding a little bit of it - I think that's really annoying, isn't it?

[timwilde]

Now here's the next question. Is it that difficult even for native speakers? If so, how the heck did that show get so popular?

Based on the marketing I see on Amazon.de, this show is very popular, as popular as say, The Office is here in the States.

[Pandachan6228]

In my opinion The Office is better than Stromberg (althoug Stromberg is a remake)...

Hmmm, I think difficult is the wrong word.... you just have to get used to it and than it's no problem to understand it (for a native speaker, I mean)... There are lots of german people who don't like Stromberg, though.
I think the funny part of the show is the way how the people react and what they say (even if it's not used naturally in everyday speech)... You need to be nearly fluent to get the jokes, I think...

[Sprachprofi]

Pandachan, this kind of talking is what native speakers do all the time. Just listen to your friends - very few sentences are actually finished correctly, very often the speaker will change ideas or change phrasing in the middle.

[Pandachan6228]

My Boyfriend (who is a native speaker) told me that they use a lot of sayings which aren't that common, so I thought it might be difficult to understand it for a non-native speaker... I'm sorry if that was wrong...