It is half a year now that S. has changed from the Italian to the German school and she couldn’t have settled in more smoothly. She made friends the very first day of school and after two months a teacher told us that she would never have thought S. was new in the class, so well is she integrated.

Not only socially but also academically the transition went well. From the start S. had no problems following the lessons, she got good or at least satisfying marks and showed great interest and passion in all subjects. Many teachers praised her German speaking skills, especially her wide vocabulary. In writing however she had and still has some catching up to do, which is no surprise considering that her class mates have started 5 years earlier than her.

German writing is difficult, but S. has improved quickly. She knows the majority of spelling rules by now and applies them when she does specific spelling or grammar exercises. When she writes longer texts though where she has to concentrate on what she writes instead of how her number of mistakes increases sharply. Part of the natural learning process I would say.

I was prepared for spelling problems but what i had not expected were certain grammar mistakes. S. often got the relative pronouns wrong “Der Mann, das ueber die Strasse ging.” (German for: The man who crossed the street.) In German the relative pronoun changes according to the grammatical gender, in Italian it doesn’t. I had noticed that S. made this mistake also in spoken German, but I never realized she hadn’t understood the basic concept.

The other big mistake S. made were the grammatical cases: “Man erkennt es an die Schwanzspitze” (German for: you can tell from the tip of the tail). This is another tricky area of the German language but I believed that S. had already mastered it. When she made mistakes in writing I started paying special attention to her speaking and realised that sometimes she got “den Mann” or “dem Mann” wrong, only I didn’t realise it as the sounds become very much alike in spoken language.

In the last half a year S. has become much better in these two areas. They are doing a lot of grammar exercises in school and these help S. to refine her language. The other day they were studying the ‘Zustandspassiv’ and the ‘Vorgangspassiv’, which is the difference between: “Das Fenster war geschlossen” (German for: the window was closed) ) and “Das Fenster wurde geschlossen” (German for: The window was being closed). I even find this difficult as a mother tongue speaker, so I suppose this could be the last step for Scarlett on her way to becoming truly bilingual.

Our priority was German and especially German writing. Half way through the term we realised however that also writing in English didn’t come easy to S. Her class mates had already written in English for a year, S. had to learn it from scratch. As her level of English is decent she got good marks orally but in the written class tests she struggled as she neither knew the spelling nor the grammar rules. Also here it took some work for S. to catch up with her class mates, but towards the end of the semester she finished with a satisfying mark.