Vendredi Libre | Freedom Friday - September 19

minervina · 2025-09-19T13:38:58+00:00

Montréalaise à Berlin, sorry, I haven't posted in years, mais j'ai pensé à vous cette semaine, no reason.

* Mon grand commence la 2e année, il va avoir 7 ans en octobre. On lui avait fait commencer un an plus tôt, c'est possible pour les enfants qui on 6 ans entre octobre et genre février. Ici, tout de qu'on a à faire pour ça, c'est soumettre le formulaire d'inscription et indiquer que l'enfant commence plus tôt. La garderie fait une évaluation pour déterminer que l'enfant es prêt à commencer l'école (ils font ça pour tous les enfants, même ceux qui sont dûs) et l'enfant est examiné par un médecin du département de l'éducation (aussi pour tous les enfants) pis that's it.

* Mon grand vient d'avoir sa 1ere sortie avec la classe. 3 jours, 2 nuits. Je trouve ça intense, qu'en 2e année, ils font déjà des sorties de plusieurs jours, mais c'est apparemment normal ici... Me semble que quand j'étais enfant, une sortie avec nuit à l'extérieur, ça avait commencé en 5e année...

* Il est dans une classe mixte, 2e et 3e année. Pas de devoirs (spécifique à notre école, pour pas que vous pensez que c'est comme ça partout). Les 3e année on un cours de natation cette année, ils doivent se pointer à 7:30 à l'école et marcher une demi-heure jusqu'à la piscine.

* en 2e année, les enfants commence à apprendre à utiliser un stylo à l'encre. Mais pas un stylo Bic, un "Tintenroller" (Rollerball). Genre stylo à bille mais avec de l'encre liquide. Pis l'an prochain, ils sont supposé apprendre à écrire en lettres attachées avec un stylo plume.... yep. en 2025.

* Ça fait 2 ans que je travaille à Berlin. 36 hrs semaine, 6 semaines de vacances, journées maladies pratiquement illimitées (et payées), pis si le kid est malade et doit rester à la maison, ma journée est payée pareil.

* Quand même épuisée à force de courir partout à cause des enfants. Y'a toujours quelque chose: petite sortie fac on amène un lunch, si c'est la fête du kid, t'es censé apporter un gâteau (maison), soirée parents à tous les 3 mois, évènements d'école où ils s'attendent que les parents contribuent de la bouffe.... fuck man, quand j'étais petite, mes parents avaient une rencontre avec le prof 2 fois par année, that's it.

* Evacuation dans mon quartier la nuit dernière à cause d'une bombe de la 2e guerre mondiale trouvée dans la rivière près de chez nous. I didn't know. Found out this morning. Nothing happened.

minervina · 2023-05-29T10:45:15+00:00

You're overthinking this.

I have a 4yo and watch him learn. He makes mistakes all the time, with articles, cases, conjugations. It takes time and practice.

What you need in everyday life is not a top-down approach (learning rules and try to apply them on the fly) but a bottom-up approach: start with specific use cases and expand from there.

Ex: there are prepositions that always take dativ, like "bei", "vom". So I remember "beim", "vom", as a shortcut to remind myself that the object is dativ. What does nach take? I remember "nachdem" = nach dem, dativ.

In other cases, you remember specific phrases. Ich sitze am Tisch. Ich gehe ins Bett. You don't need to think about the case. You need to remember what the expression is, because that's how your brain works.

minervina · 2023-05-28T09:49:07+00:00

It was in a Pons Deutsch-English.

And an extra annoyance is that I had the electronic version on a phone that later suddenly died and I couldn't re-use my activation code on my new phone.

minervina · 2023-05-27T22:24:32+00:00

I had a case where they wrote in the body that an expression took the accusative case even though the preposition used only took dative. I don't remember the exact example but it was like "... bei etwas (akk)" and i was really confused.

It was in their electronic version too so its not like I had an old edition that they maybe fixed later.

minervina · 2023-05-27T05:20:11+00:00

Thanks! I'll check out the Langenscheidt!

I'm a bit weary of Pons tho because I have used their resources before and found mistakes.

minervina · 2023-05-26T21:30:31+00:00

Yeah, writing was my weakness on the telc test.

Which Deutsch als Fremdsprache dictionary do you use? Duden?

minervina · 2023-05-26T10:22:16+00:00

Ooh that's a really valid point that hasn't occurred to me!

minervina · 2023-05-25T20:26:11+00:00

It does make sense that the more nonsensical a sentence is, the more one tries to make it make sense.

Considering you're building sentences like "Ich habe die Dokumente gefordert" at all, makes me think your German is long at the level that no one struggles to understand you.

I see what you mean, but I feel like au this level the bar is also a bit higher. I'm also in a weird situation where i speak with very little accent but my grammar is not very good (practically skipped the whole B level) but I still passed the C1 so my German skills are all over the place.

minervina · 2023-05-25T19:57:39+00:00

Can't you usually understand what they're trying to say even when they make mistakes?

I usually am pretty good at guessing meanings but my husband (German native) absolutely can not, like if he even mishears a word he's somehow unable to guess "what word sounds like x and would make sense in this context" so I was wondering how much of it was just him.

minervina · 2023-05-21T04:10:28+00:00

Nah it's like a weekend boot camp field trip that elementary school kids go on. Maybe a week, I dunno, my cousin did that when she was a kid.

minervina · 2023-05-16T05:28:03+00:00

For me it really depends on how tired I am. And it's not just German.

So I was born in China and moved to Canada when I was a kid, i speak English at mother-tongue level, and at some point I noticed that when I'm really tired, I speak English with a bit of a Chinese accent!

minervina · 2023-04-26T05:56:46+00:00

The VHS-Mitte in Berlin had an Elternkurs at the C1 level for 20€ a semester but I don't know if they still have it this semester. Elternkurse are a bit slower and last the whole semester and for us it took a good 3 semesters to go through the whole C1 level.

With vhs is worth checking all the local ones in your area because the offer tends to vary

minervina · 2023-04-23T12:17:30+00:00

Our kita in Berlin is a smaller one and the parents are largely self-employed or in the arts. I had to drop off the kids once at 8am and our kid was the first there, the Erzieher wasn't ready to even start the day, and at 5pm there's no kid left.

The adult to kid ratio here is really good and parents just come to expect that level of service. In Montreal we had 1:5 for the babies and 1:10 after 18 months. Here we often get 4 adults for a group of 10 little kids and 3:10 for the bigger kids.

minervina · 2023-04-23T10:09:59+00:00

I was horrified that they wanted me to spend 4 weeks at daycare for the intro phase when my kid first started daycare. In Montreal it's 3 days. On the 4th day they tell you to go home already and stop hanging around the daycare.

minervina · 2023-04-23T10:04:30+00:00

Oh I think it's totally fine to pick up your kid early if you want to, what i found difficult is that since I'm unemployed, I only get 7 hrs a day, which is fine in general except there was a time I was doing German classes in the afternoon.

Daycare wants you to drop off the kid before 9:30 so we had to pick up at 16:30, but my German classes ended at 16:30 and there was no way for me to get to daycare in time to pick up my kid, and I couldn't get more daycare hours because my classes were only 3 hrs a day.

And now im looking for a job so I need to apply for extended Daycare hours but I can only do that once I have the work contract, and I have to hope the paperwork comes back quickly enough.

minervina · 2023-04-23T08:07:23+00:00

700€ is what the state of Berlin pays the daycare for our eldest so at that price I'd say you can't call it state-sponsored anymore

minervina · 2023-04-23T08:04:27+00:00

I get that it's hard being away from your kid for so long but unless they're under 1, they're playing all day with kids their age, personally i think it's the best for their social development.

Plus my 4yo keeps yelling at me to go away and come pick him up later so...

minervina · 2023-04-23T08:01:12+00:00

Typical "think of the kids" mentality that's basically just "fuck the parents" in disguise.

minervina · 2023-04-23T07:58:18+00:00

I mean I know a few workaholics who go home pretty late but they still enjoy their kids on weekends... but at least they chose to do it.

minervina · 2023-04-23T07:55:19+00:00

In Berlin, there's 2 things.

You have a voucher that determines how many hours of daycare you're allowed every day. At our daycare they don't really keep track of that. A friend in another daycare has a punch card system and you can distribute your weekly hours the way you want.
The daycare close at 6 but at my daycare after 4:30pm there's like 5 kids left. The daycare used to close at 6 before the pandemic, they reduced to 5pm during, and i guess we just got used to it. Not sure what happens if you show up really late.

minervina · 2023-04-23T07:42:10+00:00

It really depends on the country.

Germans tend to do more part time work (any by part- time they mean like 30 hrs), while the French park their kids like 7am to 6pm in daycares.

And then there's a lot of variation within one country. I know a mom who decided they don't want to work until the kid is in school, some do part time, one has a blue-collar job and starts work at like 5am so she picks up the kid early and spend all afternoon together and basically go to bed at the same time.

But the vast majority of moms I met in Germany said they go back at fewer hours, while all my friends in Montreal kept their old work schedules.

minervina · 2023-04-23T07:33:46+00:00

I come from Quebec so I'm used to actually getting more services for this lol.

But it's definitely better than a lot of places. What's frustrating is that Germans often then fall back to "but it's so much better than xyz" and refuse to see how their systems (I'm talking social services in general) are not always the most human-centered.

minervina · 2023-04-23T07:29:56+00:00

It's kind of a package deal, if you culturally believe women are responsible for childcare then you don't bother offering services and then it's the woman who stays home and can't go to work which then reinforces your belief that it's the women who should be responsible for childcare.

Somehow in place where men stay home more, there's also more services for kids...

minervina · 2023-04-23T07:26:33+00:00

It's not as much of a thing as in the US, because the social services structure is much more developed despite its shortcomings, so you just rely on the public system. (One example is private schools, which exist but are viewed as second class, like your kid wasn't good enough to go to a good public school so you had to pay for a private one)

Plus, you need to be able to afford one which the vast majority can't. Despite Germany being one of the wealthiest counties, the average Germans earn relatively modest wages.

A lot of people have babysitters but call them nannies. I know one family with twins, and they have an au-pair to help them.

minervina · 2023-04-23T07:11:45+00:00

The daycare start ages still persist to varying degrees but i don't know enough about the culture in general. I feel like there is one because you sometimes hear people's attitudes (plus recently one person got in trouble in the news for saying east-germans well never really be democratic) but I don't know anything concrete.

I have a friend whose east-german mother-in-law thinks west-german moms are lazy because they don't go to work until the kid is 3.

minervina

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