EN: How Lunching with the Children will Make Me Fluent in German

Almond baked fish with boiled potatoes. 

A popular children's meal in Sweden in the 80-ies. 

Now also in Enge, Zürich. 

I have already told you how an impartial assessor recently classified my oral German as "good", and not as "very good". The truth is, however, that my written German, but also my reading and listening comprehension are at least one level above that of my spoken language. This is why a rapid improvement of my fluency is a priority project at this moment.

And since my personal finances still have not recovered after too many years of exposure to the financial crisis in Spain, I have decided to do this by myself. Walking around talking to himself will make you seem less intelligent if you do it aloud in a public place, but is an underrated method if you do it quietly or when you are alone. Give it a try!

But after a while you need external stimulus, if only not to get stuck in old habitual phrases. On one of these occasions I looked up and discovered my children. Since that day we always speak German while we are having lunch.

Sure, there have been protests, but so far I have managed to solve them by a combination of carrot and stick. The punishment if either of my sons does not want to express himself in German is that he must not use a computer for the rest of that day. And the reward? Well, that is that they are allowed to talk with me about video games, a topic which I consistently refuse to accept in Swedish.

Most of the time we talk about the game Minecraft and, yes, I have had to look up quite a few words. Here you have a few initial examples:

(building) block = der Klotz, -”e

sword = das Schwert, -er

ax = die Axt, -”e

(a suit of) armour = die Rüstung, -en

troop = die Truppe, -n

clan = der Clan, -s

dragon = der Drache, -n, -n

Maybe I should find myself a job as a medieval knight, now that I master the technical terms... ;)

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Deutsche Version (kommt bald) 

Svensk version