Posted in German with the Kinder

I went away last weekend by myself, for the first time since 2001.  It was my mother's birthday on Sunday.  I actually flew up Friday and returned on Monday.  Since I hadn't flown anywhere since 1995, the experience was a little different!  I got to spend a lot of time with my mom, my aunt (who will be 90 this year), and two of my sisters.  It definitely was a change of pace for me!  The timing seemed right in my pregnancy for a trip - I'm not too sick and not too big.

While all that is interesting I'm sure, what I really wanted to mention was that I spoke to Alexander in German on the phone.  I called and Robert was changing his diaper and put me on speaker phone.  I said, "Hi, Alexander!" and then all of sudden it hit me - I need to speak German!  Anyone who has learned another language knows that speaking on the phone is hard, and it just didn't occur to me before I actually started talking to him.  But then I said my usual, "Hast du gut geschlafen?" (Did you sleep well?) and he made a noise like he knew it was me.  Then I had no idea what to say.

On another note, I got another copy of Bilingual Baby German because our first one got destroyed.  However, when I put it on yesterday for the twins, Ryan sat there saying everything that appeared on the screen in English.  He used to repeat the German or Swedish.  I guess I will have to put it on for the twins and take Ryan in the other room for preschool!

After floundering around for a while, I think I have finally come up with a way for me to improve my German, something doable for right now.  I got the Usborne Internet-Linked German Dictionary for Beginners, which I would link to if I could find a good link LOL.  I really like this book because unlike most picture dictionaries, it doesn't just have nouns.  Each page has a theme and there are words and phrases that go with the theme.  It says that it has 2000 total words and phrases.  Now, a lot of this I already know, but there is enough mixed in that I don't know to make it worthwhile.  On the very first page, Meeting People, there was a phrase I didn't know: to shake hands (die Hand schuetteln).  And the other cool thing about this book is that, if you don't know how to pronounce something, you can go online and listen to it (hence the whole "Internet-Linked" thing).

So what I did was: I wrote down the phrase in my notepad and then looked up the verb schuetteln in my mondo-huge German dictionary.   It means "to shake."  I then wrote out how to say, "I shake his hand" and "Shake my hand!"  I also saw that you can use the same verb for "shake one's head" and "shake one's fist" (but, of course, with two different prepositions for whom one is shaking about!)  The last two days I practiced telling the twins to shake my hand.  I recently read that you need to use a word or phrase sixty times (yes, sixty!) in order to have actually learned it.  My first thought was, "No wonder I can't remember all those words I look up once!"

Last night I looked up another verb on that page, one I already knew but I figured a little review wouldn't hurt.  I discovered that besides meaning "to meet," "treffen" means "to hit" and that you can use the past participle "Getroffen!" to mean "you've got it!"  I wrote out how to say, "Don't hit him in the face!" with treffen and actually got a chance to use that today (does that surprise anyone since I have 2 two year old boys?)  So my plan is to keep working through the book, learning what I don't know and reviewing what I do know, and then incorporating it into what I say to Alexander and Christopher.