Get free Pdf Worksheets
Join Facebook groups
Kleiner Eisbär, kennst du den Weg (türkischdeut…
Kleiner Eisbär, kennst du den Weg (türkischdeut… asks the question every creature asks, in two languages. The little polar bear — kleiner Eisbär — is children’s literature’s emblem of being far from home, and ‘kennst du den Weg?’ — do you know the way? — is the sentence every newcomer, feathered or furred or five years old, learns to ask in a place. This edition, its title’s fragment tells us, speaks Turkish and German, which makes it a book for the children who live between the languages: at home in one, at school in the other, and in need of stories that refuse to make them choose. Bilingual picture books do diplomatic work. The same bear, the same journey, the same question, told in the kitchen’s language and the classroom’s — the child learns that the story does not change when the words do, that both languages can carry the same bear home. That lesson, absorbed before anyone calls it a lesson, is the foundation of bilingual life: translation is not loss. And the bear’s question outlasts childhood. Everyone who has arrived somewhere new, in a country or in a language, has been the little polar bear, asking the way.
Kleiner Eisbär, kennst du den Weg (türkischdeut… is a children’s picture storybook about a little polar bear asking the way, in a Turkish-German bilingual edition. Its readers are children growing up between Turkish and German, the parents and teachers who read across that bridge with them, and any young learner whose two languages deserve one story. In this collection it is the German shelf’s bridge for its youngest bilinguals: the same bear, the same journey, home in both languages. Read it once and it is a story; read it across a childhood and it is proof that home has two voices and both of them answer.
Get free Pdf Worksheets
Latest Uploads
About This Book
Kleiner Eisbär, kennst du den Weg (türkischdeut… is a children’s picture book — its site title trailing off mid-word, as the catalogue gives it — telling of a little polar bear and the way home, in a Turkish-German bilingual edition. The little polar bear is among the most travelled figures in children’s publishing, and the question of its title — do you know the way? — is the plot in six words: small, lost, and dependent on the kindness of guides.
The bilingual edition gives the story a second subject: the reader’s own two languages. A child between Turkish and German meets daily the suspicion that the languages are rivals — one for home, one for school, each correcting the other. A book that tells the same tale in both, page by page, refutes the rivalry in practice: the bear is equally himself in Turkish and in German, the journey equally moving, the way home equally found. For the emerging reader, the parallel text also works as the gentlest of teachers, each language glossing the other, the pictures carrying all three. What the edition really publishes is permission: both of the child’s languages belong between covers.
What Learners Will Practise
Asking the Way
Children practise the title’s own sentence and its world: asking for directions, naming the journey, the vocabulary of paths and places and helpers. It is survival language in story form — the phrases a child in a new country needs earliest — rehearsed inside the safety of a bear who needs them too.
Reading Across Two Languages
The bilingual pages train the shuttle: a sentence in one language, its twin in the other, the eye learning that meaning survives the crossing. Children practise the founding skill of bilingual reading — checking, comparing, recognising the same thought in its two coats — which no later language learning will ever make obsolete.
Feeling at Home in a Story
The book practises belonging. A lost-and-found journey, resolved in both languages, rehearses the child’s own arrival story with a happy ending attached — and the practise is emotional before it is linguistic: courage to ask, trust in guides, and the discovery that home can be reached from very far away.
Key Features
The bilingual Turkish-German telling is the feature: one bear, two of the reader’s languages, neither subordinated. The picture-book form is the second — the story carried visually for pre-readers and new readers alike — and the title’s question the third, a plot that teaches the asking. In this collection it is the German shelf’s welcome mat for Turkish-speaking children: the way home, signposted twice.
Who This Book Is For
Children between Turkish and German are its first readers — at home, in kindergarten, in the first school years. Parents form its second readership, including those stronger in one language, for whom the parallel text makes them full reading partners in both. Teachers and kindergartens make its third: a bilingual shelf’s cornerstone, where several children’s two languages are honoured at once.
How to Use This Book
Read it in whichever language the evening chooses, and let the child direct the crossings — a paragraph here, its twin there — because control over the two languages is the book’s real curriculum. Act the question: ask the way around the house, in both tongues, and answer with a guide’s kindness. When the story is known by heart in both, it has done its deepest work: the child owns one tale outright, twice.
Related Books
More twice-told tales for young bilinguals wait at Learn German German for Kids–Bilingual Stories in English and German, and the very first dictionary for small hands is Mein erstes Bildwörterbuch.
Join Whatsapp Groups
