Chapter 100 is being written to help you teach your child German.
Dear Parent
When I was a child my grandfather knew some German that he had learned from his father. His father came from Germany in 1840 and insisted his kids learn English. However, there was a monthly sermon in German at church and Grandad learned lots of German. However, that German was the dialect of peasants living around Frankfurt in 1840.
Twenty-eight years ago, my son was learning to talk and I began teaching him some German. This web project was began in June 1998 by some members of GermanList who taught German to their childern. Some of them are now teaching their kids both English and modern standard German. We welcome you to join us in our GermanList discussion group.
We plan to write an original, public domain, online book for teaching kids to read German. It would be nice if we could add sound so the kids could also speak the words in German. We have not yet solved the problem of adding sound to our German pages. If you can help us do that, we will welcome you. The most important aspect of languages for kids is learning to speak the language as kids have ability to learn sounds that they will lose long before they begin going to school.
Tests with Canadian Indians prove that at age six months, the Indian babies are too old to learn some certain sounds of their language. After that age they can never learn all the letters of their alphabet.
We do not plan to teach your child the letters of the alphabet until later. We will use a German method which teaches them to read words first. We want to use pictures and help your child learn the word that goes with the picture. Ideally, you, someone, or a tape recorder would pronounce the word for the picture in German so that the child learns to read and speak german.
How can we do this? That is the unsolved question. Come help us find a solution. All childern need some home schooling by their parents. If your school is not teaching your two-year old to speak German, it is all up to you.
Chapter 200 is devoted to learning German vocabulary by elementary childern and adults.
Chaper 300 teaches the rules of German grammar, etc. to the youth or adult trying to teach himself German.
----- to be continued ------
Editor's Note: Chapter 100 of this site is for teaching young childern to read German. It makes no difference whether they are German childern or natives of some other country. This is an international cooperative effort by the members of GermanList@listbot.com. You are invited to join us. The final version of these pages should not look anything like this first effort.
I hope the first pages of Chaper 200 will be suitable for very young childern. My experience has been that young childern shown the words for hand, head, feet, fingers, and belly, can point to that part of their body. I painted those words on white cards. The letters were in red paint and 5 cm tall. When my son was age 17 months, he enjoyed this game so much that he often brought the cards to me wanting me to hold up cards so he could play the game. Now we can use a computer and the Times Roman Font. It should be simple to write a computer program in Qbasic which you can download for this exercise. At the top of the list could be the easiest words and lower on the list could be door, floor, and more difficult terms. The parent could enter the number 7 and the computer would display the the first 7 words randomly. If the child can't remember he could the - key of the numberic pad for help and get a picture. Or he could press + for the next word.
The members of GermanList@listbot.com could write these pages and those having childern at home or in their classroom could test the programs and report back to us. Reid Andrew Eddleman (age 3 months) are you paying attention?
104 - a sample page, please suggest modifications.
Suggestions, corrections, and comments are appreciated: Contact Harold Eddleman indbio@disknet.com