Language of children books

[The waveguide]

Currently I started to learn german. I desided to buy books in german - those that I've read as a child, and that probably influenced a lot the way I speak my own mother language.
The problem was that with Astrid Lindgren "Karlsson" series I was bursting into laughter even without understanding what I was reading! The book seems to be alife, without any need in a language to understand it! I was very surprised on that.

Than I read James M. Barrie's Peter Pan. Well, sorry, that was rather surprising that Peter was so militaristic. When I got to the place where he was saying that he wants to kill the pirate, it sounded not so funny. When he was talking proudly about his chopping of pirate's hand, I had it so vividly before my eyes, the blood, the chopped hand and everything, that I stopped reading for a while.

Is that a language that making it suddenly so cruel, or is that my age, where I am no more a child, and when I know what "killing" and "hand-chopping" means?

 

[abecedarian]

I think the violence you are noticing is partially due to your age, and partially due to the time in which Peter Pan was written. During that time, children's books did not play down the sometimes violent aspects of life. Children were not as sheltered from this as they are in some ways today.

 

[G4G]

During that time, children's books did not play down the sometimes violent aspects of life. Children were not as sheltered from this as they are in some ways today.

Maybe because of this, younger kids can sometimes grow into teenagers without a full understanding of what the result of real violence can be. And then of course violent video games aren't going to help.

 

[abecedarian]

Maybe because of this, younger kids can sometimes grow into teenagers without a full understanding of what the result of real violence can be. And then of course violent video games aren't going to help.

Maybe so, but I grew up playing with my cousins, and our dads hunted and fished. We knew from an early age that real guns were for killing animals for food, and that knives were used to clean fish.We watched violent programs on TV(Combat comes to mind) and we played cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, and war games..none of us have ever used a weapon to harm a human being, nor would we dream of it. We knew that the programs were just stories Even watching the Vietnam War on the evening news did not undully harm us. I guess one of the things that kept us from losing track of reality was our parents, who in every day speech and actions, taught us that tv was just fiction, and that human life was valuable.