Help with ds's German homework please.

[admylin]

aAfter helping the Wolf get a bone out of his throat and after not being rewarded the stork says "Undank ist der Welten Lohn" something along the lines of:
Ingratitude is the worlds wages from Aesop.

Ds has got to explain what the stork means with this sentance. I can't figure it out in English let alone in German. Can anyone explain? He is 9 and normally gets no homework or atleast nothing more than abit of reading and now his teacher turns up with this!

ah the memories , saying that I'm still shocked what they expect of kids in Reception here in the UK at the tender age of 5! I started school at 6 and am sure I couldn't read & write as much as my 5.5o dd can atm.

As for language skills... fink the best method is total immersion . 'cart' her off to German speaking friends. Good excuse for some quiet time for you

My English was dreadful at school and I nearly had to repeat a year, however you wouldn't believe it nowadays the way I jabber on in English LOL and the trick? English boyfriends and now Kiwi dh

at the boyfriend method - did that at university myself (tho' didn't do German - if only I'd known...) Ended up with some unusual vocabulary
You're right about the immersion. She has friends over and goes to their houses as well but she's lacking consistent correction & feedback.
Had a good idea over lunch. She's been asking every day lately to go back to kindergarten in the afternoons which is good as there are fewer children there so she gets more attention. Pain picking her up at 12 and bringing her back at 1.30 tho' (not allowed to let her eat there as she's only got a part-time place) so have discussed it with dh & we're going to send her all day after the summer hols. Her teacher said they'll make sure they focus on her language skills a bit more. She's thrilled to bits about it. So solved that for now.

Fink, thanks for pulling me across! I've been busy trying to get paperwork done today but wasn't very successful.

"they also have to watch how they write & lose marks for it in dictations. Those loopy curly bits that must be millimeter exact"

OMG I will NEVER be able to train her to do that! She's crap at writing, I have to admit and we are working on "Schönschrift" at the moment, not very successfully. I'm really panicking about this Schreibschrift now. So if they can't get the loops and things right in dictation, they end up with a bad mark for Deutsch in their report?

at learning that Gothic type script MrsBig. It looks so nice but I don't want to have to actually read texts in it!

well done sorting that out Fink! I was wondering if you read to her in German. I find it makes quite a difference to language development. I'm sure she'll be fine. After all year 1 is not very demanding in terms of language really, is it? We had a French boy come in year 1 with ZERO German and he managed fine.

My neighbour held her dd back in kg an extra year but she is a big girl and she doesn't fit in her class, hasn't made friends, she#s the odd one out. I think she should have started school with the others her age. Twins I know who started a year later had a similar problem. The girl was moved up to year 2 about January and the boy stayed behind in year 1. Both seem to be coping fine now.

Any chance of some kind of a summer camp in German for dd? Don't know what you have there but swimming or riding maybe? Are the German grandparents nearby? Could you rope them in?

Blimey I seem to do a wonderful job of offering you two help & terrifying you at the same time
Depends on the teacher how they mark the dictations but no, even the harshest has made the point that it's only the handwriting that needs work and makes the children write out a line say of each letter or a word with that letter in it. Only one or two v swotty girls have managed perfect writing ime. I was annoyed once when ds2 made no spelling mistakes for the first time in a dictation but got "2 Fehler" and thus no smiley thingy because he twice failed to write the curly bit of the capital D exactly on the line Tends to be a Y2 thing actually, ds1 had the same I remember.
Ds2's new teacher gives him shiny stickers and "Prima!" and then makes him write out the letters he still botches. Also his writing is much better with a fountain pen.
You may have a far more sensible style - Hessen I think uses a much more modern Schreibschrift than we do. And the children do go letter by letter so you'll learn them too
Didn't you live in Moscow? Remember how hieroglyphic Cyrillic looked before you decoded the alphabet? Schreibschrift's a piece of cake compared to that.

No, I never speak German with the children and we separate books - she'll ask if she's not sure if a book's in German or English. When the boys were younger I used to translate as I read but it really does your head in so now if she wants me to read she chooses English ones. She has dh read to her mostly atm. Different for us I guess because dh is German and yours not - am I right? It's been weird having to view German as dd's "foreign language" when she does jabber it however incorrectly to her dad.
I suppose it all came to a head because she'll be in her last year after the hols and a designated school-starter. The boys were winter birthdays and OK with their German so it never really came up before.
Mil wants her to spend a week at hers having an intensive course this hols. Unfortunately her method consists of saying over and over "Schatz, ich kann dich nicht verstehen!" and then having a go at dh & telling him it's his fault her granddaughter can't speak proper German. Cue big row
Her teachers have said we'll work out a proper programme for her after the holidays so I'm hopeful by Christmas she'll have improved a lot. We'll have time anyway. Main thing is really that she wants to speak and she loves kindergarten and she loves playing "school". Would be far more worried if she were still doing the "mute" thing and was terrified of the school.
Of all the scenarios I had about raising bilingual children, this one never came up. I had fears of English being the weaker language and the dc speaking "viv werry Jurrmen aksents" but never envisaged this

This font looks like the one we used to learn with.

Or possibly this one?

Thanks, v clever, frogs Think ours is the LA one - poss stands for "lateinische Ausgangsschrift"? Have bookmarked it as sometimes ds1 tells me he's forgotten what a capital Q looks like and I have to rummage for his Y1 books on top of his wardrobe. Check out the H & X - mad.

It seems normal to me, even 30 years later! Even though I don't have very German handwriting now, I can still do those letters with my eyes shut. We also learnt to read via Schreibschrift, so early reading books were all printed like that, and only learnt Druckschrift in Y2 iirc.

It looks as though some Länder now have a simplified version of Schreibschrift - boo! I can't imagine there are many people that still use the Deutsche Schrift (?Sütterlin), though I do remember my grandfather writing like that.

Fink -- yes, LA could well be lateinische Ausgangsschrift. I remember my grandparents (who I lived with at the time) referring to my writing as 'lateinische Schrift' and being confused because to me it was obviously German.

I also learnt to tell the time in German, which was very helpful when I moved to England -- not. I still have to do a mental double take when someone says 'half eight' to work out whether they mean English half eight or German. [aargh emoticon]

Dh & I had many a cross word when we started seeing each other. "But you said half-eight!" "Yes, I did and I was there at half-eight" - till we learned to say "8.30" ...
The boys still suffer tho', what with the "halb" and the 24-hour clock: "Wir treffen uns um 16.00" "What's that, Mum?"
Then there's "dreivierteldrei" What?
"Viertelvier" What?

Sympathies, fink. I tried to explain the German system of telling the time, complete with 'dreiviertel acht' to the dc the other day, and they looked at me as if I was insane.

frogs... dreiviertel acht? how can you be so cuel?! Isn't it bad enough that 1/2 11 is 10:30 in one and 11:30 in the other? LOL

Those links don't look too bad actually. THanks frogs. Must say I prefer the second one, easier one! Hope that's what dd has to learn. The "X" is the first LA link is very flamboyant looking, isn't it? Actually those letters look quite rounded. The boys' homework I saw looked quite angular and scratchy. Perahps that's how boys write. I might have understood girls' handwriting better.

So you have faith in me fink! Thanks for the encouragement! Isn't it awful here today : Herbst mitten im Sommer.

Is viertel vier 4.15 or 3.45?

(I am sure I should know this already...)

I would say viertel NACH vier (4.15) or dreiviertel vier (3.45) or more likely viertel VOR 4 for (3.45). But I never say just viertel vier

This is really confusing isn't it! My dc have learned the time with me at home in english and ds just thinks they're wrong at school!

"Viertel 4" is 3.15.

Even in Germany only South Germans say it like that, as far as I know.

NO, Berlin is using that one to as well as dreiviertel vier being 3.45

We're a right bunch of Ausländer, aren't we admylin?! That we can't even tell the time properly. I knew I should have known what viertel 4 is! Mind you I always check, "so sechzehn Uhr fünfzehn?" to be on the safe side!

Thanks gracelo and jomaja, we'll get there in the end.

Oops 15:15!

SSSandy2, don't be too harsh on yourself,
I just discussed 'Viertel 4' with a native German speaker
and both of us were a bit puzzled!

Until we reminded ourselves that 'halb 4' is indeed 3:30.

Btw, the worst for Anglo-German mixups:
'halb 4' vs 'half 4'!

In my native Franken we do constructions such as " 5 vor viertel 4" instead of 3.10 and think this is perfectly clear.
Dp is utterly baffled by it and takes it as proof that we are just plain mad.

DaddyJ, I'm native speaker of both, and I still occasionally have moments where "Please make the light on" sounds like a perfectly acceptable construction.

Switching languages/school systems you also need to watch out for number reversing -- when I first started school in England, I would hear "thirty six" and write 63 because I'd grown up with the German system where you say the unit first. Aaargh.

And as for telling the time, let's just not go there. Even now those sums beginning, "Jack leaves home at quarter past seven. It takes him 45 minutes to walk to school. What time does he arrive?" still have the power to bring me out in a sweat.

at your post frogs!

Even more confusing when you come
across German (particularly in certain contexts) that is clearly borrowed from English.

Say in Formula 1, German racing drivers
seem to love statements like
'Das Team hat einen guten Job gemacht'.

The phrase 'das macht Sinn' is another one.
I used to cringe at first, now use it with
blissful abandon.

Gracelo, we do that too! As a child I was always confused when people didn't understand what I meant. The same when I tried to buy Schrippen anywhere bbut at home