My little girl just turned three, and she talks a lot – in French, but liberally sprinkled with German words, such as: “Donne-moi da [das] Buch.” If you ask her “How does mommy say?”, she’ll immediately provide German words for such terms as aujourd’hui – heute (today), jaune – gelb (yellow) or hippo – Nilpferd […]

The other day we met our former neighbours in the playground. The mom is German too, and her son is three years older than my girl and already fluently bilingual. We used to meet frequently when they still lived next door. The kids played together and we talked until it was time to leave. As […]

Yesterday morning, my little girl made me laugh. She took my arm, looked at my watch (upside down) and declared “C’est l’heure pour chocolat.” (It’s time for chocolate.) Of course I had to share that story with my mom. So when we called her last night for a little chat, with the loudspeaker on so […]

One of the cutest expressions from my little girl was her name for this: “bébé Maria” Yesterday she called it a “Marienkäfer”. And today she asked me for “Apfelsaft” instead of her usual “jus pomme”. Where does time go?  

A multilingual friend of mine whom I interviewed for this blog a while ago read my recent post asking Why not English? Here’s her reaction: Forget English, German is the tongue that we all wish to know, to emigrate to the country of jobs and money!!! (that’s what they say everyday on Spanish TV). But […]

Wir waren ein paar Tage bei der Oma. Ich habe eine Reihe deutscher Wörter gehört (danke schön, Mama!) und merke, es geht auch zu Hause weiter. Vorhin beim Auspacken der Einkäufe reichte sie mir meine Sachen mit “Für dich!” Wir sind in Deutschland Schon im Zug merkte sie, das etwas anders ist. Nach der Ansage […]

A couple of weeks ago, we were staying with friends in Germany whose son is the same age as our daughter. I’d hoped this would get her to activate her passive German vocabulary, and it did. Here’s one very cute example:

Ein paar Tage, bevor wir zur Oma fuhren, wollte ich unsere Tochter darauf einstimmen und ihr erzählen, dass wir frühmorgens zum Bahnhof fahren, dann erst einen und danach einen anderen Zug nehmen, und dass die Oma uns am Bahnhof abholt. Ich habe also angefangen: “Donnerstagmorgen nehmen wir unsere Koffer und-” Sie: “Et les fraises!” Ich […]

Over the long weekend, we went to see friends in Germany whose son is the same age as our little girl. The two hit it off right away, but for the first day and a half our girl used the method of “if he doesn’t understand me, I must repeat and speak more loudly”. “Viens, […]

We just spent a long weekend with monolingual German friends who have a son almost exactly our girl’s age. (More on the effects on that on our little girl’s bilingualism later.) These friends are clearly unfamiliar with the concept of bilingual families, but the question they asked proved interesting. It was fairly simple: Why German, […]