Learning to Read German...

The postman delivered another parcel this week. It's the German co-edition of Jungle Grumble:

It's always fun to get copies of foreign co-editions of my picture books. I especially enjoy it when I get German ones, as I did German A level at school, many, many moons ago. 

It got very rusty of course so, in the days when I used to torture myself at the gym, I used to work my way, painfully slowly, through German translations of trashy novels, while I was puffing away on the exercise bike - much easier vocabulary than more worthy literature. People used to laugh at me, because I had to hold the book in one hand and a pocket dictionary in the other!

After that, I decided to re-do a German GCSE, just for fun, as an evening class, because I was OK reading off the page, but absolutely rubbish at any kind of conversation - which is after all, the point of a language. I really enjoyed myself and was a real swot. A little group of us used to get together in-between classes and test each other. I got an A* and was very pleased with myself.

Anyway, enough of this rambling and back to Jungle Grumble. The fact that I can read the text (more or less) is interesting, because things are not always direct translations. The title for instance is no longer Jungle Grumble but 'The Hippo Wishes He was a Bird'.

It's great news that the 2014 German edition of 5000 copies has already sold out: the copy my publisher has just sent me is from a 2015 reprint - they have done another 4000. Hurrah! 

I also just found out that Jungle Grumble has now got a Chinese co-edition. I had Chinese editions of Stinky! and Lark in the Ark too. I love the ones with different alphabetic styles. I've had lots of Korean ones and Big Bad Wolf is Good was published in Arabic, which is great for taking into schools, because it runs in the opposite direction to a UK book, something I didn't know until I got my copy.