Oma is for grandma

I’m still frustrated, worried and slightly down about the difficulties involved in raising bilingual children but I can see a little light. Not that I’ve found the answer to all my worries or a sure way of solving them but I’ve found someone else who is taking part in the same struggle and that’s very exciting.

I met Anna!!! She lives just one suburb away from me and is also trying to raise her daughter bilingually.

So we’ve decided to start some sort of German-speaking playgroup in the Blue Mountains (Deutsche Krabbelgruppe, deutsch-sprachige Muttergruppe, zweisprachige Spielgruppe or German mothersgroup … whatever you want to call it). At the moment it’s only the two of us and our three children (two of which are too young to talk) but we’re hoping to find more parents who are on the same journey and want to join us.

BTW if this is you PLEASE leave a coment or write an email!!!!

It’s been an awfully long time since I last sat down to write something or since I last looked at my blog. Not too sure … maybe this thing isn’t really for me though I like the idea of reflecting on things that are happening or that I’m thinking about. And I think it’ll be wonderful to reread and relive my current experiences in a few years time or maybe when the girls are grown-up (scary thought!).

Regarding the language situation at the home front I’m finding myself struggeling in vain to hold back the floodgates. I’ve been trying so hard over the last 2 1/2 years to create a bit of Germany inside our house. This probably sounds ridiculous. What I mean is that I’ve been trying to present a German-language environment to the cildren at home and compensate as much as possible for the flood of English that comes streaming into their lives.

This has worked pretty well as long as Michael was speaking German as well but around 6 months ago that just wasn’t possible anymore as Mim’s life has gotten more complex than what Michael was able to express in German. But it seems that that tipped the scales and English is taking over now.

Mim is talking more and more English increasingly at the expense of her German. She’ll talk to herself in English and unfortunately she’ll also talk to E in English and what hurts me the most is that she’ll talk to me in English the majority of times. I try to just say “Kannst du das auf Deutsch sagen?” (Can you say that in German?) and she’ll repeat it in German, but I fell if I don’t keep doing that she’ll loose her ability to express herself in German really quickly. It just is so tiring and frustrating, she must feel like I’m forever criticising her.

As if raising children in itself isn’t demanding enough: teaching them about themselfes, about the world around them, skills, manners, discipline … well no, I’m also on her back about this language thing. I feel like crying at times. I feel like I’m loosing this battle. How can one single person substitute an entire society?

Whenever I feel this way I want to buy more resources for the children to make myself feel better and hope that more books, CDs and DVDs will back me up and enforce German in our house. But that’s just where I get even more depressed about this whole thing because it is just unaffordable. Having to buy every single piece of German language that I want to expose the children to is just impossible which means that they’ll always only ever have a few books which will further weaken my hopeless attempts to keep their German equally strong as their English.

I know giving up is not an option, but I do feel increasingly that it would just be the easiest and most pleasant thing for all of us (in the short term at least).

This is one of those cheerful and proud moments in the life of often helpless parents, who try to make sense of the way their children (and in particular babys) behave. Often these little people that can’t express themselves and yet have so much that they want to tell you can only resort to crying and squeeling when it all gets too much for them.

Our little E has gained another way of letting us know what’s bothering her: she started signing. In a previous post on this I wrote how we taught our first daughter to sign and that it’s been an incredibly worthwhile thing to do (there are some links to more information in the post too, if you’re interested). But that it actually ‘works’ is something that I can never quite get my head around until they’re doing it. So when I started realising that E was using her hand consistenly in exactly the same way to signal when she wants a drink I was just blown away.

Now we can start to teach her a new word and expand her signing vocabulary a little, to make our life with a baby dying to express herselve a little easier still.

Whoever came up with the idea of teaching babys to sign must have been an incredibly smart person, who I’m forever thankful to.

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.

I think, it was a good decision, because M is not picking up Michael’s mistakes when speaking German, and her English has really taken off since then. She’s very comfortable holding a conversation in English now and can translate brilliantly from one to the other.

Unfortunately that means, that English has somehow become her more comfortable language and she’ll use English when talking to herself or even to her sister (which worries me a bit), but she’ll only speak German to me. So I suppose that only means, that she’s understood the contexts of the two languages now “The world is English and mummy is the only weirdo, who I’ve got to speak German with”. Oh well, we’ll see what’ll happen.

But the competition is certainly on now, as everything Michael teaches her he does in English. So when I “caught” them counting to 20 and beyond the other day I thought to myself, right she’ll need to learn how to count to 20 in German too. And I also catch myself repeating lots of things that Michael says to her in German just to be on equal footing.

The funny thing is that Michael seems to live in a postgerman era and still uses German occasionally with the kids, usually when he’s not concentrating but just wanting to say something really quickly. So now he tells them off in German and explains in English. Wonder what that does for their language development??

Am I truly bilingual myself?

Most people don’t realise that I’m not Australian when they first meet me. And that might be taken as a compliment on my English or the accent (or lack thereof) but every now and then I really give myself away and make a total fool of myself. I guess learning a second language isn’t all that easy after all.

There was the time, for example, that Michael and I were trying to organise to buy a house in Australia while we were still overseas. His parents really tried to help us out a lot and organised a lot of the nitty gritty for us. That was the word I was ment to say but out came: “It’s so good that you’re parents are going through the nipple gripple for us” (Michael had been telling me stories of his mates and him giving each other nipple gripples in college). Woopsy!

When bushwalking in Australia you’re bound to hear lots of different bird calls. Friends would say: “Can you hear the bower bird?” or “I think that was a bell bird.” Being me I didn’t realise that they were talking about two different bird calls, so the only way I could make sens of this was to call the bird bowel bird. Wonder what that one would sound like, though?

And the one time that I totally sent Michael into hysterical fits from laughing was when I said: “That’s Bonox!” But maybe vegetable stock is better than some crude swear word?!

I guess those Kookaburras in the photo would laugh pretty hard about me, and maybe I should do the same, but sometimes I just find it right out embarassing to look so dumb.

(Kookaburras are birds whose call sound like a real belly chuckle and you can hear them every day at dusk and dawn in Australia if you life anywhere near the bush. They certainly always make me laugh.)