Stefan Haertel
Title
Hi, I thought I might share this with you.
Saturday, I had to hold a speech on Alexander the Great in school (the backgrounds of this are too elaborate to explain here). I chose to put the main focus on his march through the Gedrosian desert, and I was indeed highly praised for it.
But as my (german) language is for some reason (summer?) swiftly becoming worse, I made some interesting mistakes and statements that the audience, for some reason, highly appreciated (in a way...). The ones I can remember are the following:
(when describing the territories the Macedonians marched through) "...Syria, Israel, the People's Republi... excuse me, Palestine, Egypt..."
(some people actually got that. It was wishful thinking, I guess)
(the Macedonians in India) "...when the soldiers refused to continue ther march, Alexander retreated into his tent where he...sulked for three days" (and the audience roared with laughter, for some reason).
"...Alexander's teacher, Aristotle, was one of the wisest men of his times, he is still very famous now..."
(another major roar...)
"...the second quote is by a relatively well-known Corsian statesman named Napoleon Bonaparte, whom the most of you will propably know as emperor of France..."
But the main thing about this speech was, that I reduced Alexander to an incredible monster, if only, because I've simply got enough of this topic for a while... one of my (former) teachers later came to me and told me how surprised she was to learn that Alexander was such a cruel man, she always thought of him as some sort of "ancient Gandhi"...
Saturday, I had to hold a speech on Alexander the Great in school (the backgrounds of this are too elaborate to explain here). I chose to put the main focus on his march through the Gedrosian desert, and I was indeed highly praised for it.
But as my (german) language is for some reason (summer?) swiftly becoming worse, I made some interesting mistakes and statements that the audience, for some reason, highly appreciated (in a way...). The ones I can remember are the following:
(when describing the territories the Macedonians marched through) "...Syria, Israel, the People's Republi... excuse me, Palestine, Egypt..."
(some people actually got that. It was wishful thinking, I guess)
(the Macedonians in India) "...when the soldiers refused to continue ther march, Alexander retreated into his tent where he...sulked for three days" (and the audience roared with laughter, for some reason).
"...Alexander's teacher, Aristotle, was one of the wisest men of his times, he is still very famous now..."
(another major roar...)
"...the second quote is by a relatively well-known Corsian statesman named Napoleon Bonaparte, whom the most of you will propably know as emperor of France..."
But the main thing about this speech was, that I reduced Alexander to an incredible monster, if only, because I've simply got enough of this topic for a while... one of my (former) teachers later came to me and told me how surprised she was to learn that Alexander was such a cruel man, she always thought of him as some sort of "ancient Gandhi"...
- what were her sources?
