After another two-word sentence tihs week, “maman encore” (mommy, do that again), my little girl has finally mastered the word yes. “Oui” (mostly) and “ja” (occasionally) replace her longstanding “hm” that we’ve generally taken for assent to far. There’s also “là” (there) when pointing at something, which she had not used in that way before. […]

Yes, our little girl attacks the challenge of longer words! The first ones I noted this week were pa(pa)pon for papillon (butterfly in French) and papagei(pa) for Papagei (parrot in German).

The other day, actually the morning after her second birthday, my little girl and I were on Skype with Grandpa, sitting on the bed so she’d be in front of the laptop’s camera. While we were talking, she installed herself with a pillow, a doll and the covers and said “[Her name] dodo.” (Translation: “I […]

I might or might not have mentioned that our girl, when she’s in the right mood, will repeat words after us. With one exception: If she already has a word for something (like “mau” for “cat”), she won’t say “cat”, however often we say it. She’ll stick with “mau”. So I guess her onomatopoeia should […]

We’re back from a visit with the German granny (Oma), where our little girl had a lot to say. Here’s a sample of what she told her Oma as they were looking at the pictures of a fairy tales book together: talk

Following on the heels on my post from earlier this week reporting the first bilingual expression of our little girl, yesterday I did my first bilingual correction. We were on the phone with my mom. That is to say, I was on the phone with the loudspeaker on, and my daughter was listening. She said […]

I proudly announce that our girl is now officially bilingual: Today she said for the first time a word in French that she already says in German. Which one? Good-bye. That is to say, “aurvoir” (still contracted) after “tschü-tschüß” about two months ago. With the handful of recognisable words she says, it seems to me […]

This weekend I discovered that sometimes a lesson in bilingualism doesn’t need more than a little goodwill and basic (and I mean very basic) muscial skills. You see, our little girl is the proud owner of a xylophone – and the only tune I can play on it is “Alle meine Entchen”. There might be […]

Our girl was sick and teething and coughing recently (yes, all at once), so when she wasn’t too keen on supper, we were indulgent. On Monday night she was well again, but when I came home, Daddy was already engaged in the supper battle with her. Since sometimes she’ll eat with one of us but not […]

“Rotes Licht und Grün, das kann doch jeder leicht verstehn. Bei Rot halt an und rühr dich nicht, bei Grün, da darfst du gehn!” Ich habe vor kurzem damit angefangen, unsere Kleine auf die rote bzw. grüne Ampel aufmerksam zu machen, wenn wir über die Straße gehen, und da kommt mir immer sofort das Lied […]