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).

Aldona left the following comment on my post “Would I go there?”

… I did see a huge difference between the two sides. A HUGE difference! I also found that the teachers from the East were more interested in their pupils than the West. In the West you became a teacher so you could become a Beamte, and then you had it ‘made in the shade’.

It reminded me of this very interesting interview I saw on the television a few weeks back. Maybe I only liked it cause I agreed with it but to me it seemed like a very well balanced perspective on the differences between life in “the East” and life in “the West” as well as the losses and gains of an “East-German” family.

Following on from the topic of the previous post, I read this interesting interview with Rita Suessmuth on Deutsche Welle.

She says, for example:

Among the estimated 200 million migrants worldwide, the majority make up what is called “forced migration.” That means these people haven’t left their countries voluntarily, but because of extreme poverty, war or political violence

I thought that was very interesting as I’d only just talked about the fact that I wouldn’t “choose” Germany was I to immigrate. But it looks as if there’s often not really any “choosing” but just surviving.

Realising that I’m not up-to-date on what’s going on “back home” (in my birthcountry) I’ve been following the news on Deutsch Welle a bit more closely.

The articles have really shocked me in the past few weeks. Though maybe that’s the aim of good reporting to focus on shortcomings and keep a country or region (or whatever the focus-point of the reporting) on it’s toes. But I’ve really been asking myself whether as an immigrant I’d choose to go to Germany with everything going on there.

Following the education discussion on my blog I was quite sadened to read that it’s official: German schools trail significantly in immigrant education. Why after so many years of educating immigrant children alongside of native kids does the German education system still not manage to support those kids properly?

The second things that has absolutely shocked me is that my home-state of Brandenburg was labelled as a racist no-go zone for people with dark skin.

Why would immigrants choose to live in Germany with all this going on? I certainly started to think that this country I’m still calling ‘home’ seems somewhat unattractive and after reading the current DW articles I’d think twice whether there might be a more hospitable place to go to.