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).
