World of Rectshriebung

Feeling unwell, J stayed home from school today. He spent a good bit of the day reading his German-language World of Warcraft compendium:

Then drafted a couple of characters of his own, based on the people of the Murinae he invented a year and a half ago:

He has not written German for awhile; I'm obviously gonna have to work with him on his spelling:

Winston words

Of late J has been using all sorts of new German words and expressions. This evening he was describing "die blecherne Stimme" of a robot. Yesterday he actually used "gewissermaßen" in a sentence, perfectly correctly. When I ask him where he's been getting these words, he says: "Das habe ich bei Winston aufgeschnappt." I think by now he's listened to the three Winston stories we have some 10-15 times each.  

Madeleine L'Engle

Now that we have finished Michael Ende's Die Unendliche Geschichte / The Neverending Story, we're starting a new series, Madeleine L'Engle's famous trilogy. Here we are at the campground this weekend starting A Wrinkle in Time / Die Zeitfalte: 

The German translations are all out of print, so I ordered them on Amazon. 

Spiegel-Leser wissen mehr

Ending the Neverending Story

Since last year, K and I have set aside Saturday and sometimes also Sunday early mornings for reading out loud to J, usually about an hour. We first read C.S. Lewis's Narnia series, in the original English. After we finished that last Spring, we started Michael Ende's Unendliche Geschichte, me reading in German, K in English. 

We finally finished it yesterday. 

As you can see, J plays while we read. Sometimes he would bang about with his toys and makes spaceship sound-effects and not seem to be paying attention, whereupon we would halt with a huff and threaten to stop reading. But then time after time, when K & I were scratching our heads trying to recall an earlier episode in this long story, J would cooly note exactly when it was and pretty much exactly what was said. D'oh!

Hörbuch-Selbstberieselung

Several months ago we bought J an Ipod player. Now he spends pretty much all of his alone playtime around the house listening to audiobooks while he plays, bathes, and when he eats on his own at breakfast on schooldays.

He listens to both his English and German audiobooks, but more the German, because he has more and is more familiar with them. Recently he has been listening to Frauke Scheunemann's Winston series, about a cat detective. He listens to the stories over and over and can quote whole scenes by heart. 

    

Hiatus

It has been nearly a year since I last posted. The demands of department headship have made it difficult to continue to find the time for all my L2 routines with J, much less for writing about them! But I'm going to make more of an effort again. 

Exactly one year ago, I wrote a post about how my major L2 acquisition goals had been met, as J was now reading German books independently. He has continued to do so. He is now reading German and English books at the same level. Here he is from yesterday reading a book in one of his favorite new series, Ute Krause's Muskeltiere:

This is a real chapter-book:

Using the very nice index of age-appropriateness at the Oetinger Verlag, this book seems to be at the 8-9 year old reading level. Which is perfect; J turns 8 in a month.

Now, over the past year, a decent amount of bedtime reading time with J has been him reading to me. About 5-10 minutes out of 20. And he had been making good progress. Up until about 2 months ago, however, I felt that his German reading level was still measurably behind his English, to judge by what I heard when he read to K. 

Since then, the gap has closed. That has a lot to do with a trip to Austria we took in September, about which more later. Since then, he has been doing a lot more independent reading in German. We bought a lot of books while we were in Vienna. 

Up until about a month ago, I was still a little skeptical about how much he was actually understanding of these longer, more complicated stories. I knew he was getting the main plot points and even a lot more. But I doubted he was understanding everything, or more or less everything. 

But he was. That has been borne in on me with the last Muskeltiere book. After he read it, we stared listening to the audiobook. To test him, I asked him on several occasions to describe what happened in an scene before we listened to it. Without exception, he described in considerable detail, and it was all exactly as he said. 

Das Urmellied

J has been singing the "Urmel song" of the Augsburger Puppenkiste all afternoon:

Das Urmellied 

Alle Mamis sagen immer
Tindlein gib schön Acht.
Bleib schön brav in deinem Zimmer
und schlaf - Gute Nacht. 

Aber wenn das Tindlein größer
darf's spazieren geh'n
weil sonst tönnt' das tleine Tindlein
gar nie schöne Sachen seh'n. 

Alle Tindlein sagen immer
"Mami laß' mich raus"
Bleib ganz lieb in deinem Zimmer
ich komm bald nach Haus' 

Aber wenn das Tindlein fort ist
denkt es nicht mehr dran
weil es doch so viele hundert
schöne Sachen sehen kann.

Wenn das tleine Tindlein dann
nach Hause fröhlich geht
schimpft die Mami gleich das Tindlein
"du tommst viel zu spät"

Liebe Mami sei nicht böse
und merk dir zum Schluß
daß das tleine Tindlein doch
die schönen Sachen sehen muß!

ganz Gans

On our Christmas vacation drive to Ohio, J made a reference to the homonymy between ganz and Gans, whereupon we developed Gans into a unit for measuring the intensity of things, mostly emotions. So, for example:

A: "Bist du sauer auf mich?"
J: "Ja, ganz sauer."
A: "Also, eine Gans sauer, ja?"
J: "Eigentlich ganz, ganz sauer."
A: "Also zwei Gänse sauer?"

Yearly statistics (2016)

Here were the stats from last year (2015):

Total L2 audio: 80.33 hours
Avg: 13:14 minutes per day

Total L2 video: 95.26 hours
Avg: 15:41 minutes per day

Here is this year (2016):

Total L2 audio: 54.28 hours
Avg: 8.95 minutes per day.

Total L2 video: 70.45 hours
Avg: 11.63 minutes per day

Total L2 gamplay: 8.40 hours
Avg: 1.4 minutes per day (but highly sporadic)

So in 2016 J had about 20 minutes of audio-visual L2 input per day, down from about 30 minutes in 2015. Most of this reduction has to do with the fact that 2016 was the first full chronological year that J was in school full-time; in half of 2015 he was still in pre-school, which was half-days three days a week. At that time, I was still generally able to spend one weekday per week with him in an L2-intensive way. My six-week absence in summer 2016 also had an effect. 

All in all, I feel J is getting a substantial amout of L2 media input every day. 

Update: Another difference in the 2016 stats is that for the last several months, there are several regular instances of L2 media use I am no longer recording because it is inconvenient. For example, as I write this, J is sitting in the bathtub listening to Pu der Bär. He regularly listens to audiobooks in the tub and playing (for example with legos), both in German and in English. Over the course of a year this probably amounts to several extra hours of L2 listening. 

Media update 298

J Reading: Cornelia Neudert, Betina Gotzen-Beek, Monstergeschichten (35 pp.). J Reading with me: Sabine Kalwitzki, "Schulausflug mit Supermann." Das große Buch der Abenteuer (Würzburg: Arena Verlag 2015), p. 14-55. Me Reading: Max Kruse, Urmel aus dem Eis. 

Listening: Augsburger Puppenkiste, Urmel aus dem Eis (114 min.); C.S. Lewis, Der König von Narnia (225 min.) 

Viewing: RoxasLP SoraHerz, Let's Play Ratatouille, various episodes (127 min.); Augsburger Puppenkiste, Urmel aus dem Eis, episodes 1-3 (123 min.)

2016
Total audio: 54.28
Total video: 70.45 
Total gamplay: 8.40
Age 7.2.31