Learning to read
My son Jan Thomas just had his fourth birthday. He has found out that it would be nice if he could read. He can read a bit already which has proved very practical. When he and his younger brother watches Thomas The Tank Engine he presses the Yes button to the question if the avi file should be repaired and, after twenty seconds, they can enjoy the next episode.
There is a problem though. He would like to learn to read in three languages. His mother’s Spanish, his father’s Norwegian, and his school’s English. On the market the other day we bought an English alphabet jigsaw puzzle set. The letter ‘a’ has a drawing of an apple, and the challenge is to find the pieces and join them. The problem is that apple in Spanish (‘manzana’) doesn’t start with an ‘a’, neither does the Norwegian ‘eple’.
Today we have tried to make an alphabet list for the three languages. This is what we have found.
English – Spanish – Norwegian
boat – barco – båt
hero – heroe – helt
elephant – elefante – elefant
jungle – jungla – jungel
lion – leon – løve
new – nuevo – ny
pear – pera – pære
rat – rata – rotte
sun – sol – sol
train – tren – tog
There are 16 letters missing. Can you help?
If your Norwegian is lacking, do English and Spanish, or English and French, or Italian, …
I am lettering on you so don’t letter me down.
November 30th, 2009 at 8:20 am
Heh, my first thought, that the world cusses in English, is probably no help.
I did think of a game. Player one says a word, “apple”. Player two translates the word to “eple”, and thinks of a word that starts with e, “eats”. The next player has the challenge of translating “eats”.
If, together, the players can generate a relatively grammatical sentence, all the better. Good thing you’re trilingual!
November 30th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
It will be neat when this is complete. I’ll be able to help with English and Spanish but “my Norwegian is rusty” /wink. Coming up with words that begin with the same letter in each language is interesting.
alphabet – alfabeto
angel – ángel
cabin – cabaña
Q will be tough since the letter is used so differently in English and Spanish. A lot of the ‘q’ words begin with ‘cu’. The only word I can think of requires a bit of poetic license (or a thesaurus). quieto, in the sense of “quedate quieto” could be translated as quiet although calm is probably closer. Anyway, that would work if you can’t come up with any others.
Time for bed. I’ll try to help out with some more tomorrow.
November 30th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
alphabet – alfabeto – alfabet is fine, but angel is engel and cabin is hytte in Norwegian.
15 to go!
November 30th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
diameter – diámetro – diameter
fine – fino – fin
grey – gris – grå
kiosk – kiosco – kiosk
middle – medio – midten
10 to go!
December 1st, 2009 at 3:11 am
By the way, that graphic you used is pretty interesting. I forget which artist made that but essentially each letter is the first letter of a common brand. How many can you name? I can only name about half.
December 1st, 2009 at 3:28 am
zeppelin >> zepelín >> ????
yogurt >> yogurt >> ????
xylophone >> xilófono >> ????
whiskey >> whisky >> whiskyen (While some would call this inappropriate for kids, I’m pretty sure this is the only ‘w’ that fits the requirements.)
December 1st, 2009 at 6:20 am
day – dia – dag
night – noche – natt
I like night better than new which I had before.
With Michael’s four suggestions, which I am believe can be translated to Norwegian with the same first letter (will check the spelling later) only 5 remains!
i, o, q, u, and v.