New friends

In January, a new little boy, J joined James' kindergarten. I met his mom fairly quickly, because we were both speaking English to James' teacher. They had moved to Germany a few months earlier from Mexico. It wasn't long before all of James' stories about school involved this little boy, and the rest is history. We've gotten together to let the boys play at least once a week, for the past several months, and over the school holidays we've been seeing them almost every day. James really enjoys his new friend, and J has a brother 6 months older than David, so the whole thing is really perfect. The four of them run around together and are totally crazy!

One of the coolest things about James' friendship with J is that they are both learning German together. J is a year older than James, and was forced to start speaking German in the kindergarten from day one since the kindergarten teachers speak no Spanish. James' German has come along quite a bit slower, but I think his friendship with J has motivated him to speak more. While he's a bit inhibited with German friends his age, or German adults, he has not problem rattling of whole sentences in German to his new best friend. He's come so far!

One of the cutest things with James' German is how he handles it when he doesn't know a word. Since there are so many German words that are similar to English, when in doubt, he conjugates an English word into German. For example, last week, he saw a movie at J's house, and exclaimed excitedly, "Cars! Ich habe Cars schon gewatched!" (I have cars already watched) Except, watched is not a German word. He then paused for a minute, and corrected himself "gesehen"(seen). Needless to say, he's come a long way from a few months ago when the most you could ever get out of him was some counting and a few colors.

I'm excited to see what the next school year has in store for James, and how capable he will be at speaking German by the time we leave.