Relative clauses

This morning during our library chat, J was killing the relative clauses. While describing the various tests he accomplished in a videogame this morning, these kinds of sentences were veritably streaming out of him: 

Ich habe alles geholt, was ich holen musste.
Ich glaube, das war der erste Test, den ich geschafft habe. 

I was especially excited about that masculine accusative singular relative pronoun, especially in combination with subordinating word order. There were 3-4 examples of this. I don't believe I heard a single error in basic grammar and syntax. 

By the way, the videogame was "School of Dragons," based on the movie How to Train Your Dragon.

In his description this morning, J was also using a lot of terminology from this book we have just acquired and been reading. 

So today was a very good example of how books + videogames can be used to leverage a lot of active L2 production. I've just ordered a large German World of Warcraft book in order to better be able to do this with that game.  

Daily conversation time

For the last five months, on the four days per week that I take J to school, we've had a routine where we sit down together in the library for a few minutes (2-5) and have a chat (always in German of course). 

(Thanks to librarian Tanya H. for the photos)

This has become an important part of our L2 routine after the pre-k days when we had one whole day together per week. It is also a lovely bit of quality father-son time. It's one of those many ways in which our L2 relationship, which I, like many people, had initially feared would feel unnatural, has in fact encouraged behaviors and interactions that contribute to the quality of the relationship with my son. If I had never undertaken to speak German with him, would it have occurred to me to set aside a few minutes every day to just chat with him? Maybe. But maybe not!

Initially I would read something like jokes or riddles. In the last couple of months I've stopped doing that and we've just been talking about whatever comes up. Recently it's been World of Warcraft. All I have to do is ask J about his characters and quests and he'll just narrate away.

Another thing I've started doing recently is to have him ask me questions. His task is to think up one good question every morning, about something he doesn't know about me or his mother. The goal here is to encourage him to take an active interest in other people's lives and perspectives, become a good listener and interlocutor. He has good social skills already (L2 may play a role in this), this is just building on that.    

Changes / Medienwandel

Numerous factors are making it increasingly difficult to post daily updates on L2 media, so I'm going to change "Media today #___" to "Media update #___" and reduce these posts to every few days.

Also, I will no longer be recording certain things like "Let's Play Minecraft" videos, because during his tablet time J accesses these himself now from the Youtube "history" function and it would be very difficult and time consuming to trace and document his record. 

Since we're monitoring him somewhat less, I am not unconcerned about him stumbling across videos with inappropriate content among the "suggested videos" that appear on the right side of the screen, but at this point he seems to be sticking to the videos of his favorite players as they move through their various series. A couple of these players (like SparkofPhoenix for example) do use light profanity, but as I've explained before, this is not necessarily a bad thing, since profanity is a part of any living language, and anyway J would be exposed to it were he growing up in a German-speaking country. However, we are trying to pay attention that he not come across anything too horrible. 

On the other hand, I'm very happy that, during his tablet time, J is opting for just as many German videos as English ones. In the last couple of weeks, in fact, he's been watching almost exclusively German ones. This is fantastic for his language development. SparkofPhoenix, for example, speaks very quickly and often mumblingly-slurringly. This is great counterpoint to my German, which is often overproper in its enunciation, not to mention things like vocabulary and sentence construction, etc. 

There are also numerous bits of daily semi-targeted L2 use that are going unrecorded. For example, on the four days per week I take J to school, I make an effort to arrive a couple of minutes early so that we have time to sit down on a bench or in the library and read a couple of jokes, riddles, or interesting facts. For this purpose I have materials like the following ready on my ipod via kindle:

• Volker Friebel, Rätsel für Kinder
• Imke Stotz, Sagt Ulf zu Gnulf... : Die 500 besten Kinderwitze
• Norbert Golluch, Schlauer geht's nicht — über 700 Kinderfragen und ihre Antworten.

Idiom in focus 1: anvertrauen (jemandem etwas; sich jemandem)

I'm renaming this excercise because it has very quickly become clear that one day will not suffice to work the expression in a really meaningful way. So now I will keep a particular idiom "in focus" until I feel we have explored it a sufficient syntactic and semantic depth. 

With anvertrauen, for example, it takes awhile to generate enough conversation such as to cover the two basic usages, one involving a direct object (jemandem etwas anvertrauen, "to entrust/confide something to somebody") and one reflexive (sich jemandem anvertrauen, "to confide in somebody"). So far I have used the former with J but not yet the latter.

Plus it is necessary to exploit the different syntactical possibilities involving the seperable prefix. 

1. Ich habe auch ein paar weitere Geheimnisse aus meiner Kindheit, die ich dir später anvertrauen werde.

2. Ich habe auch ein paar weitere Geheimnisse aus meiner Kindheit, die vertraue ich dir später an. 

I did manage to use both of these this morning, but they bear a lot of repetition.

Update 4.4.15: J used this expression with me this morning, after two days of repeated usage by me in various contexts. 

Idiom of the day 1

With "reading words of the week" and "vocabulary walks" working so well, I'll now try daily introducing a particular idiom into conversation. 

jemandem etwas anvertrauen, "to confide something to somebody."

This morning on our way to school I said to J: "Darf ich dir etwas anvertrauen?", then proceeded to tell him about my special relationship with my best friend Peter and Peter's son Gabriel, my godson, who visited this past weekend. This is not new information for J, nor is it exactly the kind of thing one needs to say "in confidence," so the idiom usage was a little oblique. But close enough. This evening I'm going to work something like the following into our chat.

"Weißt du, du kannst mir alles anvertrauen. Wenn es je etwas gibt, worüber du reden willst, was aber vielleicht peinlich oder schmerzlich ist, das kannst du mir und der Mama immer anvertrauen, und wir besprechen die Sache und helfen dir dabei. Verstehst du?"

See the update on this post.

Little conversation starters

If you speak to your child in the L2, and they understand and respond in the L1, that's good. We should never lose sight of the fact that this qualifies as L2 success and if it never gets beyond this, you have accomplished something major: Your child understands a second language!

However, if you speak to your child in the L2, and they understand and respond in the L2, that's obviously much better. It's awesome. It's huge. But it's so awesome that I think a lot of people consider it the very definition of L2 success. It isn't. 

Best of all is when your child to speaks to you in the L2, and you understand and respond in the L2. That is, when your child actively initiates new L2 conversations of their own accord and in their own terms and about things on their own little mind. 

Ideally, there should be no difference in the frequency with which they do this in the L2 compared to the L1. 

A lot of very simple and concrete things can serve to empower children in this way. I'll have more on this later, but one thing that has worked for me from very early on is to seed daily interactions with spontaneous little conversation starters like the following: 

Hey Kleiner, weißt du, was mir aufgefallen ist? ("Hey little man, you know what I've noticed?" Then I point out some—any!—funny or interesting thing I have observed, and we talk and/or laugh about it.)

Hey Kleiner, weißt du, was mir eingefallen ist? ("Hey little man, you know what's just occurred to me?" Then I describe some—any!—funny or interesting thought, etc.)  

Hey Kleiner, weißt du noch, wie ...? ("Hey little man, remember how ... ?" Then I recall some—any!—meaningful experience, and we reminisce.)  

Once I had modeled these enough (first with the puppets), my son began to use them himself, and he does to this day. In my experience, if you make a habit of keeping the thoughts that follow these intros quite short (one or two sentences), the child is more likely to use them.