German speaker needed as talk partner to a 7-yo in Lower Earley

[yotiao]

Hi there,

I am looking for a solution to a following problem: I have a tri-lingual daughter (DE/UK/PL), who was born in Germany and (used to) speaks perfect German. We moved to UK last year and while she did not speak English then, she now speaks English quite well - but she lost a lot of her German.

We want her to keep her German, she is very fond of it (and misses Germany a lot), but the trick is that neither of us is German, nor any of us speaks decent German. So I am looking for someone who could regularly come to our place and talk to my daughter in German only. I do not want it to be 'a lesson' or 'private tutor' (which is the only thing I can find online, and expensive too), I just want my daughter to enjoy talking to someone in proper German. She still understands everything, she watches/listens to German stuff, but I estimate she lost something like half or more of her speaking. This is absolutely heartbreaking to me.

If you have any tips for finding a right person to do this, please let me know. I am based in Lower Earley in Reading.

Thanks,
yot

Could she talk on Skype with someone she knows from Germany?

No, not really - her friends from DE with whom she would like to talk most do not use computers too much, and the school times/school breaks are almost completely not overlapping...

Are you on FB? The Wokingham Gossip Girls group is great for things like this.

In your position I would register her with the nearest Samstagsschule, which might well be Woking/Guildford for you. It's 25 miles away but I think they only take place every 14 days (on Saturday obviously). The advantage is that the kids talk among themselves in German, so they're massively motivated to keep up the language actively.