08 January, 2010

..and then the monster ate them.

For Christmas the kids got Scribblenauts, a video game in which the player solves problems by writing down the name of the tool he wants to use to get out of various scrapes. S and B speak English fluently but they've got definite holes in their vocabulary because they spend most of their day speaking German. With American music, movies, friends and family they'll catch up eventually, but for now this makes for some very amusing mistakes when they're searching for words.

This morning they must have hit a rough patch in their game and I heard them in the other room debating excitedly:

What do you call those things! ACK! What are they called? Bull? Bull-? Aha! I know! GUNBULLETS!

4 comments:

Expats Again said...

Cute! Thanks for informing us about this game. It would be fun for all children, but I agree it is perfect for language reinforcement.

Goofball said...

damn, I am missing the point here. I came by a couple of times already but I think I am not getting something.


So I suppose gunbullets is an unexisting word?

Betsy said...

Oh no point really, just that "gunbullets" isn't a real word. Just a mash-up of two words, which, come to think of it, is something the Germans love to do.

So of course "gunbullets" wasn't in the dictionary, so the Monster ate them and they lost the game.

Maybe you just had to be there, but it sounded funny and made me laugh. :-)

Lisa in London said...

I think they discovered a flaw in the game program! I think gunbullets is a perfectly good word. After all, they could been hippo bullets or spaghetti bullets or the very obscure brazier bullets. In this instance though, I'm confident that gun bullet was the right choice...