Dauerselbstberieselung 2

J is home from camps for the rest of the summer, and has spent most of this week drawing space-pictures and listening on his ipod to Frauke Scheunemann's Winston series:

That's something like 15 hours of audiobook listening in three days. The last time he did this with such intensity was about a year ago.

By the way, Frauke Scheunemann's literary style is fantastic, filled with witticism and wordplay. And the narrator Oliver Kalkofe is quite brilliant as well. 

L2 writing 7 (WoW-Tagebuch)

Here is the entry for today:

Not pretty, but progress is slowly being made. And he wrote two sentences more than I asked! I suggested umbringen, dabei, Umhang, Tram nehmen; he came up with erringen, sich begeben (zu)/nach, Lärm machen, and von da aus.

Classic sci-fi 2

Here's my first classic sci-fi post. In the last few weeks I've been reading Arthur C. Clarke stories to/with J, available in German via inexpensive Kindle editions. Right now we're in the middle of this collection:

These stories are great for where J is right now, both language-wise and conceptually. Clarke's style is very lucid, with fairly short sentences and not a lot of technical vocabulary. The plots are concrete and people-centered, mostly set in the near future, when humans have recently made the jump to living in space and in the process of colonizing the solar system. And, with some exceptions, the tone is optimistic about the future. That is important to me. At the moment, young adult sci-fi seems very pessimistic by and large, oriented towards dystopian scenarios. It echoes adult sensibilities. I don't think that's a good thing for children, at least not unmitigated. I personally feel gloomy about the future in many ways, but I do my best to spare my son these fears and do my damndest to communicate to him a positive vision of the future. 

Right now he's on fire about space travel and, after watching a documentary about Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, wants to build "space hotels." He has also been obsessed with the panet Saturn all year. Well, lo and behold, Clarke wrote a short story about a space hotelier building a hotel with a view of Saturn:

Awesome!

Erwachsenensachhörbücher! / Nonfiction audiobooks for grownups!

Another significant L2 milestone this weekend: J and I started listening to real grownup German audiobooks on our drives: 

He's doing just fine with them. After all, we've been watching grownup German documentaries for some time now. 

By the way, even though I don't post on them anymore, we've never stopped taking our regular audiobook listening drives, usually three or four weekday early mornings for 20 minutes, and once per weekend for a little longer. Here's my original post on the importance of these drives for J's initial L2 learning.

At this point, we often interrupt the audiobook for longer periods and converse, sometimes discussing the story or material, sometimes using that as a springboard into other conversations, sometimes not even getting around to much listening and just talking. 

L2 Writing 6 (dictation)

Here is the dictation from this morning (last three lines):

J actually seems to enjoy the various exercises with writing in the last three or four days, after an initial two weeks of a lot of complaining. One reason, I believe, is that he realizes his writing has improved over the last couple of weeks, that he's more in control of it and that it looks better aesthetically. I showed him pictures of before and after, and he was quite impressed:

L2 Writing 5

Today J wrote out corrections from yesterday's diary entry, then wrote a new one from this morning's gameplay: 

L2 Writing 5

Wow, I may have just found the key! In exchange for extra time playing World of Warcraft today, J has just agreed to write a dairy entry describing what he did in the game. Once we finished playing, he set himself down with great alacrity and wrote the entry:

Then we went over mistakes:

While I haven't succeeded in getting J to start keeping a dairy of his real life, it may actually work with virtual reality! At least long enough for him to get some writing skillz together ...