Rammschwein

gerissene Schafe

Reading this Spiegel article about leopards living in the city of Mumbai ...

J and I come across the following sentence: 

Knowing the normal meaning of gerissen ("clever," "tricky"), J made a funny face. I explained that in this context it means weggerissen, "snatched away." He burst out laughing, and said that the image of shepherds getting mad about clever and tricky sheep is too funny.  

"Wie ich zu sagen pflege..."

J came out with this fancy expression (translation: "As I'm in the habit of saying") in the course of normal conversation this morning, something like: "Papa, wie ich zu sagen pflege, wann immer so was passiert..." I asked him where he picked it up, and he pointed to this scene in Asterix als Legionär:

Also yesterday he used the expression "I beg to differ," which he said he learned from Calvin and Hobbes.

Spiegel-Leser usw.

Recently I have begun to read J articles from Der Spiegel, mostly sciency stuff at this point. This article is about recent octopus research: 

Occasionally I need to define words, simplify and explain a bit, but in general he seems to understand everything, asks questions, and can retell the material. 

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.