We've had great success so far with our approach to raising our kids bi-lingual. I only speak English with the boys and my husband only German. Keeping this clear separation has worked very well. Although because we live in Germany and hear German all around us, I do need to work a little harder to reinforce the boys’ English. We love our weekly English playgroup meetings, watch kids movies in English and video Skype frequently with my family. Yet just as Kim and I make funny language mistakes, so do the kids. Over the weekend, big brother P was baking an apple cake with his Oma and she said it was time to add the mehl (flour). P said “nein, Oma, dass ist Blumen!” (no Oma, that is flower!) He had translated the English word flour into the German word for flowers (Blumen). She didn’t catch it, so I had to explain. Ohhh, the strange and complicated English language! My husband would note, why are they spelled differently yet pronounced the same?
6 comments:
If you speak to the kids in English and Roland speaks to the kids in German - what do you two speak to each other???????????????????
We speak english with each other! We met speaking english, and his english is so good that it's just wierd and too much effort to switch to german. Plus that way the boys get to hear a little more english at home... It works!
That's a fantastic story - he'll get a laugh out of that one day when he's a dad :-D Tell him I sympathize - I once ordered a pint of wool at a pub in Norway!
Love that mixup! Sometimes I think my husband (also German) will specifically try to hunt out those strange words and spellings to throw me off. Our closest friends are doing the very same thing with English/German. It seems to be working really well with their little girl, so when the time comes, my husband and I want to do the same.
So cool to find two Americans teaming up to blog. We're in Berlin with the exception of this summer in the US.
Katie
Great story... kids are just so smart! My husband and I have been talking a lot about how we want to do things with raising our kids bi-lingual. We have heard a lot about the system that you use... one parent speaking English, and one parent speaking German. Is your home language English or German? I am quite curious to learn all that I can because it is so important to me that I can communicate with my child, but that they can also acclimate themselves into the culture that we live in.
I guess you could say our home language is english because my husband and I speak that to each other, but he still only uses german with the kids. I think it's important to stick with your language... there's some bilingual kids at our kindergarten but the one parent did not keep a clear boundary and mixes in german instead of sticking to the native language. I belive the children understand the language, they seem to always respond in german. There are about two familes I can think of that have this situation. I'm sure there are other models, but this plan is working for us so far! Plus there's so much german in daily life around us that they pick that up easily!
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