Need book recommendations
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Looking for books that are written in simple English (no fancy vocabulary or long-winded sentences) with stories that may be intriguing for a 13-year old pubescent boy (if such stories exist at all) who learns English as second language.
@klaus said in Need book recommendations:
Looking for books that are written in simple English (no fancy vocabulary or long-winded sentences) with stories that may be intriguing for a 13-year old pubescent boy (if such stories exist at all) who learns English as second language.
What kinda stories does he like? Sci-fi? Adventure?
Does he like graphic novels?
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@klaus said in Need book recommendations:
@george-k said in Need book recommendations:
Harry Potter?
Way too complicated and too long.
Not the first book or two in the series. Another series would be the Percy Jackson books. A bit dated, but the Heinlein juvenile books like Have Spacesuit, Will Travel or The Rolling Stones would be good.
Newer stuff would be Al Capone Does My Shirts or maybe A Night Divided. The last one is a Berlin Wall story...
“Cry havoc and let slip the DOGE of war!”
Those who cheered as J-6 American prisoners were locked in solitary for 18 months without trial, now suddenly fight tooth and nail for foreign terrorists’ "due process". — Buck Sexton
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Sci-Fi might be good. Graphic novels would interest him, but they should contain a non-trivial amount of text - the point is to work on his English skills.
@klaus said in Need book recommendations:
Sci-Fi might be good. Graphic novels would interest him, but they should contain a non-trivial amount of text - the point is to work on his English skills.
Yeah, I don't mean comic books. Graphic novels can be pretty lengthy. You might want to look into Logicomix? Lots of text, pretty easy reading level, but the subject matter might interest you, too, so it might be something you can do together if he's into that?
Some you might want to look into:
Holes
Lord of the Flies (seriously)
The City of Ember
Alice in Wonderland
The Oz series
The Maze Runner
Explorer Academy
The Firefly Code
The Wild RobotMost of those, I believe, are for kids a little younger than he is, but they're also newer and therefore not old and boring.
The Oz books are (if I remember) easy to read, short, and really engrossing. They're not condescending to kids, either.
Please love yourself.
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@klaus said in Need book recommendations:
Sci-Fi might be good. Graphic novels would interest him, but they should contain a non-trivial amount of text - the point is to work on his English skills.
Yeah, I don't mean comic books. Graphic novels can be pretty lengthy. You might want to look into Logicomix? Lots of text, pretty easy reading level, but the subject matter might interest you, too, so it might be something you can do together if he's into that?
Some you might want to look into:
Holes
Lord of the Flies (seriously)
The City of Ember
Alice in Wonderland
The Oz series
The Maze Runner
Explorer Academy
The Firefly Code
The Wild RobotMost of those, I believe, are for kids a little younger than he is, but they're also newer and therefore not old and boring.
The Oz books are (if I remember) easy to read, short, and really engrossing. They're not condescending to kids, either.
@aqua-letifer said in Need book recommendations:
Lord of the Flies (seriously)
He has actually just started (somewhat hesitantly, after I recommend it) that book in the German translation.
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@klaus said in Need book recommendations:
Sci-Fi might be good. Graphic novels would interest him, but they should contain a non-trivial amount of text - the point is to work on his English skills.
Yeah, I don't mean comic books. Graphic novels can be pretty lengthy. You might want to look into Logicomix? Lots of text, pretty easy reading level, but the subject matter might interest you, too, so it might be something you can do together if he's into that?
Some you might want to look into:
Holes
Lord of the Flies (seriously)
The City of Ember
Alice in Wonderland
The Oz series
The Maze Runner
Explorer Academy
The Firefly Code
The Wild RobotMost of those, I believe, are for kids a little younger than he is, but they're also newer and therefore not old and boring.
The Oz books are (if I remember) easy to read, short, and really engrossing. They're not condescending to kids, either.
@aqua-letifer said in Need book recommendations:
You might want to look into Logicomix?
You mean the philosophical Russel/Wittgenstein/.... thing? I got a copy in my book shelf. I'm sure he'd appreciate easy words like "epistemology" or "post-structuralism", let alone the subject matters such as logical paradoxes
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@klaus said in Need book recommendations:
@george-k said in Need book recommendations:
Harry Potter?
Way too complicated and too long.
Not the first book or two in the series. Another series would be the Percy Jackson books. A bit dated, but the Heinlein juvenile books like Have Spacesuit, Will Travel or The Rolling Stones would be good.
Newer stuff would be Al Capone Does My Shirts or maybe A Night Divided. The last one is a Berlin Wall story...
@jolly said in Need book recommendations:
Not the first book or two in the series.
I'll check out your suggestions, but I think you are overestimating the English capabilities of average 13yo Germans
They'll maybe know a thousand words. They cannot construct an English sentence with more than five words that does not contain multiple errors. Reading books in a foreign language is really really hard. -
What might work is stories that are super adventurous, so much so that it's worth the effort to conquer the language in order to find out what happens next!
Unfortunately, I can't think of any easy texts right now. There's Captain Blood and Beau Geste, but they are certain to be too advanced.
Rafael Sabatini, who wrote Captain Blood, also wrote some short stories, if you can find them. I don't know if they'd be any easier, but at least they'd be short.
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The Hobbit?
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Oo! Oo! I just thought of something! The Hardy Boys!
"The Hardy Boys, brothers Frank and Joe Hardy, are fictional characters who appear in several mystery series for children and teens."
Success is measured by your discipline and inner peace. – Mike Ditka
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Oo! Oo! I just thought of something! The Hardy Boys!
"The Hardy Boys, brothers Frank and Joe Hardy, are fictional characters who appear in several mystery series for children and teens."
@catseye3 said in Need book recommendations:
Oo! Oo! I just thought of something! The Hardy Boys!
"The Hardy Boys, brothers Frank and Joe Hardy, are fictional characters who appear in several mystery series for children and teens."
I absolutely hated those books.
(And one of the authors did too, from what I read!) -
@jolly said in Need book recommendations:
Not the first book or two in the series.
I'll check out your suggestions, but I think you are overestimating the English capabilities of average 13yo Germans
They'll maybe know a thousand words. They cannot construct an English sentence with more than five words that does not contain multiple errors. Reading books in a foreign language is really really hard.@klaus said in Need book recommendations:
I'll check out your suggestions, but I think you are overestimating the English capabilities of average 13yo Germans
They'll maybe know a thousand words. They cannot construct an English sentence with more than five words that does not contain multiple errors. Reading books in a foreign language is really really hard.I applaud you and your son for taking this on. This is the first time I see anyone asking for book recommendations specifically to facilitate the learning of a second language.
The unfortunate thing is if I take your "1000 word vocabulary" assessment literally and try to map it to a native anglophone's age or grade level, this site maps it to below age five. I cannot think of any book written for five year olds that would have content that is interesting to a 13 year old. You may have to resort to graphic novels. :man-shrugging:
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@catseye3 said in Need book recommendations:
Klaus, disregard what Aqua said above. He was drunk.
It's smugglers, okay? Smugglers.
It was always smugglers.
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@klaus said in Need book recommendations:
I'll check out your suggestions, but I think you are overestimating the English capabilities of average 13yo Germans
They'll maybe know a thousand words. They cannot construct an English sentence with more than five words that does not contain multiple errors. Reading books in a foreign language is really really hard.I applaud you and your son for taking this on. This is the first time I see anyone asking for book recommendations specifically to facilitate the learning of a second language.
The unfortunate thing is if I take your "1000 word vocabulary" assessment literally and try to map it to a native anglophone's age or grade level, this site maps it to below age five. I cannot think of any book written for five year olds that would have content that is interesting to a 13 year old. You may have to resort to graphic novels. :man-shrugging:
@axtremus said in Need book recommendations:
The unfortunate thing is if I take your "1000 word vocabulary" assessment literally and try to map it to a native anglophone's age or grade level, this site maps it to below age five.
I found this mapping from grades to CEFR language levels:
5th grade: A1
6th grade: A1+
7th grade: A2
8th grade: A2+
9th grade: B1
10th grade: B1+
12th grade: B2+My son is 7th grade, so level A2. According to this website A2 vocabulary is around 1500 words.
I think it is in general a lot of work to speak a foreign language as good as a 5 year old native speaker.
