If you have read my guest post Bilingual Travelers: Sweet Exposure to Language and Culture in Germany over at Bilingual Monkeys about last year’s summer holiday, you will have noticed the minority language gets a boost with food. This year is no different. On our first day in the holiday resort, I’d forgotten to give […]

Yesterday, my 5-year-old daughter and her German grandma (Oma) settled down to watch a Garfield cartoon. My daughter told Oma: “If Garfield is in French, you can learn French!” Then the opening sequence finished and a voice announced the title of the episode. My daughter’s eyes opened wide and she exclaimed: “It’s in German!” Well, […]

After reading a book in which the protagonist interviews various people (with sometimes outlandish questions!) for her school newspaper, and a first experiment of Interviewing Mommy, here is finally the long-awaited, hilarious Interview with Grandma This interview is already two months old, it was made only a few days after our then not-quite-5-year-old girl interviewed […]

I am very much looking forward to our visit with Grandma, because she hasn’t seen my now 5-year-old daughter in a while (3 months, that is). I’d like her to tell me if my impression is right that my daughter’s German skills have improved quite a bit recently. Just tonight, as I came home after […]

Do you know the German prefix “über”? It means “over” and is used in such verbs as überholen (overtake), überhören (overhear), übersehen (overlook), überschreiben (overwrite) – you get the idea. However, it is also used to designate the day after tomorrow. Tomorrow is morgen, the day after tomorrow is übermorgen, and the day after the […]

We’ve been reading a book where the protagonist interviews various people for her school newspaper. That gave my daughter the idea to interview me. And what better way to record her vocabulary and sentence structure? And her imagination, of course! Enjoy “Interview with Mommy” in three parts (and in German, our minority language): interview part […]

Two weeks ago, on Easter weekend, my family accompanied me to Amsterdam, where I attended a conference. They spent the weekend with the family of another attendee, whose daughter is two years older than mine. They live in Germany, but her mother is English. The two girls had a great time, chatting away in German […]

My 4½-year-old daughter speaks German (minority language) with a French (majority language) accent, up to and including the famous “H”. I expect this will get better as her German grows stronger. Meanwhile, she doesn’t always seem to hear the difference, either. Which led to a funny situation the other day when I read her a […]

A few weeks ago, I don’t remember how exactly it started, my daughter and I began a spelling and writing game with nouns starting with SCH. (There are lots of those in German.) The idea was that I would spell the word, she would write it down, and then one of us would draw the […]

During school holidays, our 4½-year-old daughter attends the centre de loisir in her school building. On the last day of the week, there is usually a party, and kids can come in costumes. Last Friday when I picked up my little witch, I met her BFF S. about whom I’d already heard a lot. She […]