AMD 5, Julia Hooker

When I was very little, my father used to do a lot of work in Germany. He would travel there at least twice every year for months at a time, and every time he came back, he would bring me and my brothers gifts. Many of these gifts were books in German. Even now that we are all well beyond reading childrens books, my dad luckily kept the books so I could read some of them for this AMD. I read "Wo die wilden Kerle wohnen" ("Where the Wild Things Are"), "Das verlorne Shaf" (a cute story for two year olds about a farmer looking for his lost sheep), and then I read the first couple of pages of another much longer, and more difficult book called Weissnaschen und ihre Freunde until I realized that it was almost as difficult to read as "Eine Woche Voller Samstage" and I had already read twenty pages of that, and was not in for flipping through pages in my German dictionary so fast I was about to rip the pages out.

What I learned was that I can at least read German at the level of a four year old, maybe a little bit older. It's encouraging considering that a year ago I could read no German whatsoever. Unsurprisingly, I found a lot of narrative past in these books, which gave me good practice in learning them.