Emil und die Detektive

We've been listening to this classic, the first time also for me:

J is especially delighted with the Berlin brogue of "Justav" and some of the other characters.

Today we listened to the section where Gustav's friends have agreed to help Emil and are concocting a plan for keeping tabs on the presumed thief, Grundeis. J loves all stories involving the concoction of schemes and plans by children. Practically every thirty seconds he was interrupting the audiobook and, based on what was going on in the story, spinning some scheme of his own for his upcoming playdate with his group of friends. 

Classic sci-fi

In the last few weeks J and I have been reading/listening to Jules Verne's 20,000 Meilen unter dem Meer and listening to H.G. Wells's Die Zeitmaschine.

The Verne is linguistically quite difficult, with long convoluted and periodic sentences. J loves the story, but has asked to postpone reading further (we watched the 1954 Hollywoood film, which satisfied him for now). Die Zeitmaschine is a notch or two down in terms of language complexity and he understands most everything. He has listened with great interest, and it has sparked a lot of great conversations about what he would like to do if he could time-travel, how he sees the future (not nearly so pessimistic as the Wells's Time-Traveller, thank goodness!), etc.   

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: