Tue 21 Mar 2006
I’m mourning the end of an era … but I suppose that usually means the start of something new, which might be just as exciting (if not better), but right now I’m feeling grouchy!
Ever since the birth of our first daughter my husband has been making a huge effort to make German our ‘home language’. That ment that both of us were only ever speaking German with her, though we mostly spoke English with each other.
We had read about common approaches to bilingual childrearing and knew that the “One-parent-one-language” approach would have best suited our situation (I’m a native German speaker and my husband is a native English speaker). Though, knowing how strong the influence of English is, especially when all friends and relatives our daughter has regular contact with are English-speaking, we wanted to provide as much reinforcement for the German language as possible. Also, my husband was feeling a little selfish and thought that speaking German with our daughter would mean he had plenty of opportunity to practise his German and improve.
His German certainly has improved dramatically since the birth of our daughter, but never having taken any formal German classes or lived in Germany, now our daughter is overtaking him. She’s starting to prompt him, when he’s struggeling to find the right words and instructions are sometimes so unclear that even I can’t exactly make out what’s required of her (sorry, darling!).
So, as of yesterday my husband is speaking Enlish with our daughters. M seems quite excited about the whole thing and is already speaking mostly English with him, except when she runs out of words in English she’ll default to German (E isn’t exactly aware of what’s going on). I’m somewhat glad that my husband can express himself a lot more freely now, but can’t help feeling slightly vulnerable about it.
I’m it, now! I’m on my own!
I guess only time will tell how this new era in our family life is going to work out.
March 22nd, 2006 at 12:36 am
Das ist ziemlich interessant. Ich hab schon immermal überlegt, wie es wäre, zweisprachig aufzuwachsen - ich kann mir einfach kaum vorstellen, dass man die Sprachen dann nicht durcheinander bringt. Aber wenn es funktioniert, ist das sicherlich sehr gut für das Kind.
March 22nd, 2006 at 8:31 am
Grouchy?! It was your idea! It’s kinda sad for me too Franzie… but exciting at the same time.
Now the stories that I tell M. at bed time are much more colourful… instead of “Der Teddy flusterte: ‘Ich kann fliegen’ “, now “The Teddy whispered into Ronja’s ear, with a little smirk on his face: ‘I can soar through the sky like a shooting star!’”
Not sure yet whether to start out with German with E. though… I think it worked really well, both speaking the one language til M. was old enough to differentiate (”Oma sagt ‘dunkel’, Grandma says ‘dark’”).
March 22nd, 2006 at 11:33 am
I know the struggle. My husband should speak swiss german.. but he prefers english. So we try to speak swiss german to each other. Used to be our secret languge but the little monsters understand everything. lol.. kids love secrets and the motivation to understand is huge. At school they are taught in german and they have english and thai as second language. Multi lingual. Why did we want to raise our kids like this???!!!! no, its ok
March 22nd, 2006 at 4:37 pm
Are you reading my mind? I have been thinking about this very problem. Chinese is a problem for us. Hubby speaks it I dont but we want our daughter to. hmm
March 23rd, 2006 at 12:24 am
You’ll be just fine, Franzie, but now it’s up to you to speak *only* German to your girls all the time, inside and outside the house so they’ll get enough exposure to the language.
March 23rd, 2006 at 9:17 am
Andreas Danke fuer Dein Kommentar.
Ich denke, wenn man konsequent ist, dann kommen die Kinder auch mit den Sprachen nicht durcheinander.
Na und fuer die Kinder kann es ja nur zum Vorteil sein die Faehigkeit zwei Sprachen zu sprechen “in die Wiege gelegt zu bekommen” wie man so schoen sagt, denn andere Menschen muessen sich Fremdsprachen schwer erarbeiten.
Michael I know it was my idea, but am I not allowed to feel sad that things are changing even if it might be better this way now?!
I think it’ll be good for your relationship with her to speak English, and that’s exciting for me!
Lillian I know exactly what you mean with the secret language. My husband and I would discuss (in English) whether to take M in the shower of give her a bath that night. Before we’d even finished talking she’d start undressing herself shouting “M duschen!” … and she was not even 18mths then. Well we understood pretty quickly, that though she wasn’t speaking English then, she definitely understood every word of what we’re saying.
What sort of school do your kids go to that it’s run in German? German school in the middle of Thailand?
Andrea What’s your current arrangement? Who speaks what to who?
I guess it makes it more interesting (but possibly more complicated as well) when there’s more than just two languages involved?
Christina Yes, that’s the scary thing. I’m noticing my German becoming more and more ‘englishized’. My sentence structure is very English at times and other expressions as well, according to my mum, sound as if I’ve translated from English into German.
How did you manage not feeling rude towards other people speaking English to your boys in front of people when they obviously couldn’t understand what you’re saying?
We’ve had some people ask whether we’d be saying bad things about them to the children, they obviously missed the point of bilingual childrearing.
March 23rd, 2006 at 6:45 pm
The one parent one language really does work well. It wasn’t hard for me to only speak English to our child as my German was so bad!
March 24th, 2006 at 8:46 am
That’s really encouraging to hear, especially coming from the dad, who generally only has evenings and weekends with the children (so much less exposure to the language spoken by dad).
How do you go living in Germany with little or bad English? Don’t you have to do all your work in German?? Still interested in that one as Michael’s German isn’t brilliant either.
March 25th, 2006 at 12:44 pm
Hi haddock, talk about mama-brainpower. I did prove read but even that doesn’t seem to help
of course I meant bad German!!, hope you understood anyway.
March 26th, 2006 at 3:21 am
Luckily I work in a job where is English is the working language. I understand German quite well, its just that my spoken German is so terrible. Some days are better than others…..but I am not too worried about it, I always manage to struggle through somehow!
March 26th, 2006 at 10:42 am
Well, I just never thought it was anybody’s business what language I spoke to my children in and it never felt rude to me. With German friends who don’t understand English I might translate a bit if it’s really important but otherwise I just ignore anyone who has a problem with it. People who ask if you’ve been saying bad things about them are probably a bit paranoid to start with. It shows their own insecurities. But I also made a point of not saying something in English to my kids about someone else that I wouldn’t say if I knew that person could understand the language, if that makes sense. We didn’t use it as a kind of secret language to make fun of people and I’m certain you don’t do that either. Any making fun of people is done in private.
As for using the sentence structure of one language in another, I think it’s essential to keep up your mother tongue by reading and writing in your native language as much as possible, even if you’re only speaking it to your children. Sometimes languages change so fast it’s hard to stay on top of things. We only get back to Canada every two years, and I often hear “new” words or phrases that I hadn’t heard before. I like it when I can pass these things on to my kids so they really get a sense of the culture.
Have you been keeping up with the “Rechtsschreibreform”? That’s something I find quite appalling and detrimental to the German language.
March 27th, 2006 at 2:09 pm
Thanks Christina, it’s really good to hear other people’s stories.
I do make a big effort only ever to speak German with the girls but maybe I should stop feeling rude about it, cause as you said, it’s not some secret language to be saying bad things about other people but just the language that I’ve chosen to speak with the children. I do find that I have to translate more and more for the visitors though, makes it easier to just say it in English (but that’s probably just laziness
Reading and writing in German is not the problem, but when I want to communicate something quickly (you know when you just babble it out), I sometimes listen to myself and think “that didn’t sound quite right”. I don’t have anybody around to speak German with other than people who are learning the language (and so their mistakes start to sound normal to me, to the point that I can’t distinguish what sounds right and wrong).
Yes, the Rechtschreibreform is quite awful, during my last year of school they started introducing it but we didn’t have to use it or cover it as we were halfway through our Abitur already. Straight after finishing my Abitur I went overseas where I met my husband and have never been back to Germany to live there since, so I’m really not uptodate with the new Rechtschreibung. But I get the feeling that many German people just ignore it, as it’s so silly, and only kids who are currently in school are really affected by it.
June 8th, 2006 at 3:13 pm
[...] I’ve been meaning to write an update of our family language situation ever since the last post in which I said that Michael was speaking English with the children now. [...]