Dana Newman / Wanted Adventure
In the first example, Dana Newman is a young woman from Florida, who finished college and immediately moved to Prague in search of adventure abroad (2008). She had to renew a visa in Munich, which she happened to meet a young man who soon became her husband. Her channel, Wanted Adventure, has over 200,000 subscribers and over 400 videos; 53M total views. Nearly all the vlogs are in English, and she describes the miracles, puzzles, and curiosities of living in Germany. (Water heaters in apartments are so weird! The post offices are unlike any other country!). There are a few videos where she speaks German the whole time, and others where she marvels at the puzzles of the German language. (Mark Twain wrote a wonderful article about the bizarreness of German).
Here's my choice for a first video. I shared it with my offspring, who took to high school language class about the way a cat takes to a bath. In this video, Dana marvels with cheer and wit about her frustrations with some German word pairs that are hard to figure out and remember. It's hard to recall anybody who's as enthusiastic and charming about anything. Watch at least the first minute or two!
HERE.
Besides her channel, she's also written a book just published in German about her experiences (You go me on the cookie!, in German, here). (It's actually her second book after a 2012 novel in English).
Martin Molin / Wintergadan
Martin is a young Swedish musician whose channel started in 2012 and has 175M total views, with over 1M subscribers. Here.
The showpiece video is Marble Machine, a music instrument built of thousands of parts and playing one melody by using 2000 marbles on a xylophone and other instruments. The earworm melody has been played over 90M times. The machine was years in the making (the first one was retired and he's making a second one) - the channel holds dozens and dozens of nerdy, enthusiastic, carefully made videos about the design and construction. (After watching several of them, I think it would have been easier to make a House of Cards twenty feet high...)
Find this viral music video
HERE.
Interview with Martin here, Wikipedia here, music website here.
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Check out both channels for T-shirts available as branded merchandise.
Named link as
https://tinyurl.com/joyandperseverance
