Today our girl went out with Daddy. When they came home and left the car in our parking garage, she pointed to the fire extinguisher: “Papa, que c’est que ça ?” (“Daddy, what’s that?”) “C’est un extincteur. Pour éteindre s’il y a le feu.” (“That’s a fire extinguisher. When there’s a fire, to put it […]

This morning when we left home to go to the nanny’s, my little girl was extremely talkative. And by extremely, I mean she was talking non-stop. I think it was some kind of story, or maybe the same story over and over again, as I recognised the same “words” several times. Listen to her here: […]

I just noticed something interesting today. My little girl recently converted to muesli. I bought some fancy ones for kids at mymuesli (which I highly recommend), “Prinzessinnenmüsli” with strawberries and raspberries, and “Piratenmüsli” with tiny white and milk chocolate pieces. My little girl tried them both, and admired the beautifully decorated muesli tins they came […]

Just a fun moment from this morning: Like every morning, my girl and I ride the bus one stop on our way to the nanny’s. Like every morning, I tell her “Wir steigen gleich aus” (“we’ll get off the bus in a moment”) as the bus approaches the bus stop. Like every morning, she gets […]

A week or two ago, the nanny told us about an incident that had occurred in the hall of her apartment building when they had met a neighbour. Our girl was wearing this: The neighbour: “C’est un beau chapeau!” (“What a nice hat!”) Our girl: “C’est pas chapeau!” (“That’s not a hat!”) The neighbour, amused: […]

Did I mention that I hoped a stay with my non-French-speaking mom would get my girl to activate her German? It turns out this is sometimes easier than expected. The other evening, my girl (two-and-a-half) was delaying going to bed by slowing down the undressing process: “Maman, attends !” (“Mommy, wait!”) Me (slightly unnerved because […]

Does baby language count as a language? I mean the sort consisting of fixed words (such as “wauwau” for “dog”) that are not real words yet are used os consistently that parents and other regular care-takers will understand them as if they were. In that case, our daughter is making trilingual sentences. “Wauwau pas da?” […]

I recently interviewed a multilingual friend who is originally from Spain but grew up in the Brussels area where she still lives now. She arrived there as a young child in a Catalan-only speaking family and would go back to Spain to visit family several times (including summer holidays) each year. With her parents and […]

My little girl is into making sentences these days. They are somewhat lacking articles and prepositions, but you get the idea. Although they are generally in French, German words are being used. A popular expression is “That’s my…” “C’est ma Kuh !” (German, cow, female.) “C’est ma lapin !” (French, bunny, male.) “C’est ma coussin […]

I had hoped that our Christmas holiday with my monolingual mom would yield some results in term of active German vocabulary, but not even the day spent with my friend and her two daughters (almost 6 and almost 2, the former very talkative) did. Then two days ago, our also-almost-six-year-old bilingual neighbour came over, and […]