Weekly Recommendation: Dark
Hey there!
Here’s your weekly German media recommendation from Monoglot Anxiety. This time, it's the Netflix original series Dark.
But first, a quick note from me:
Want to share your language journey on my blog? I'm looking for normal folks at all stages of language learning to share their stories on my blog this summer and beyond. Specifically, I want to share your stories with the first foreign language(s) you learned because you wanted to, and not just for school.
If you're interested in writing a guest post, just shoot me an email!
Dark
Discovering Dark on Netflix was unironically one of the most important reasons why I can speak German today. Although I didn't realize it at the time, watching and watching and re-watching Dark — at first with English subtitles, but very quickly, because I'm stubborn, with only German ones — taught me to learn languages via comprehensible input. I love this show, I see it as a masterpiece of planned-end storytelling in an age of "let's see how long we can drag this out" television, and it will always be special to me.
Without spoiling too much, Dark is a suspenseful science-fantasy thriller series involving a cave, a creepy forest, and a little town home to four dysfunctional families with deep ties to each other. Season one centers around a disappearance mystery, but the plot quickly (and naturally, not as a tacked-on addition) spirals out from there. Although some of the marketing at the beginning might have made it seem like Dark is a Stranger Things clone, what with its gang of kids and 80s sequences, it is anything but. The series has a totally different tone, and while the teenagers are important characters, it is in its robust cast of fully-realized adult characters that Dark really shines. People at every stage of life have a role to play in Dark, and this is one of the aspects that I think make it most unique about the show. I could talk about Dark for ages, but I'll stop here in the name of respecting your time.
Ok, one final word of advice: even if you dislike the first episode, keep going. Episode 1 contains some jump scares and a bit of gore, and it is not reflective of the tone of the rest of the series. I didn't like Episode 1 that much, but by Episode 3 I was sold.
Because it rewards re-watching, Dark is a great source of comprehensible input
Re-watching the same content multiple times makes it more comprehensible, but unfortunately that also usually makes it boring, which makes it bad input. Not so with Dark.Once you can understand enough German to watch Dark comfortably without English subtitles (I'd say 40-60% of what you hear, but I'm ridiculously stubborn when it comes to watching stuff beyond my level), watch it. Then watch it again. And again. And again. By its nature, Dark rewards re-watching very well. Watching the show again knowing how it ends is a completely different emotional experience from watching it naively.
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That's all for this week,
Elise from Monoglot Anxiety