Comment élever un enfant dans le bilinguisme, c’est le titre d’une émission passée cette semaine sur RFI, avec comme invitée, Barbara Abdelilah-Bauer, fondatrice du Café Bilingue et généralement spécialiste dans la matière.

Pour l’instant, l’émission qui dure 26 minutes est encore disponible sur le site de RFI ici. (Si le lien ne marche plus, j’ai sauvegardé le fichier audio là.)

L’émission fait le tour des principales questions et problématiques que puisent se poser des parents dans une situation de bilinguisme, donc c’est une bonne introduction au sujet.

We’re at the next stage, with sentences like “non pas ça” (no not that) becoming more frequent.

Today we had a good laugh when Daddy threatened to do something at the count of three.
He began, in a suitably menacing voice: “Un…” (one)
Our little girl, who’s beginning to learn numbers: “Non, pas deux!” (No, not two!)

Our girl has taken to scribbling with ball-point pens whenever she can get hold of them. And when she does, she asks for “papi” (Papier in German or papier in French, paper).

With results that to our surprise look like this:

We’re still doing a lot of guesswork, but after a week or two of daddy’s hard work, our little girl has consented to calling a cat a “chat” instead of “mau”.

Other words evolve without help: until very recently, her evening bottle (whether milk or soup) was designated as “lolo”, but now she makes the distinction, as she requests a bottle of “lait” (milk), turning down offers of soup.

Morgendliches Ritual: Wir gehen aus der Wohung, ich schließe die Tür ab, sie läuft vor zum Fahrstuhl.

Neulich forderte ich sie mal wieder auf: “Rufst du den Fahrstuhl?”

“Hallo!”

🙂

Why didn’t I think of this earlier? Whenever I brought my MP3 player out to record my girl, she reached for it and any chances of catching her “natural speaking” were gone. This morning, I hit the “record” button and let her have it. She still thinks it’s a phone. (I’m glad it isn’t, or my phone bill would be disastrous. ;-))

Enjoy!

a discussion on parrots (Papagei in German)

jargon

on the phone 1 (not sure who she’s calling there)

on the phone 2 (ends with her spotting a dog we check on every morning)

on the phone 3 (ends with her looking for a cat we sometimes see in the morning)

We’re back from our holidays, and I realise just how much more our little girl (two years and one month) is saying these days. Ask her yes-no questions and you will get a real answer, sometimes a heartfelt “oh oui!” and at others a definite “ah non!”.

There are more two-word sentences coming, notably in combination with “au revoir” when she goes away from something (“au revoir de l’eau” for water – swimming pool or other – or “au revoir brumbrum” when we left the car in a parking lot to enter the supermarket). Today I heard “voilà maman”, and of course I get “bonjour maman” and “au revoir maman” on a daily basis.

Daddy has worked during the holidays to make her say “chat” instead of “mau”, which she does now, I just haven’t managed to record it. The delightful tone of her voice when she speaks of cats is something I absolutely want to capture.

She says “bonjour” to everyone she meets these days, and if they don’t answer, she’ll repeat it. During our holiday in Canada, she picked up the local farewell greeting which evolved over two weeks from “ba-ba” to a proper and recognisable “bye-bye”.

Here’s what I managed to record this morning on the way to the nanny’s:

jargon

Papagei

In the second one you can hear her say “Papagei” as she looks for the parrots that are sometimes (but not today) in their cage on a ground-floor balcony.

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. And finally, she has mastered the proper pronunciation of “au revoir”.

What a week!

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 sleep.”) “Dodo” is the baby word for dormir (sleep in French), as in Métro – boulot – dodo.

And the next day, on the sofa currently serving as bed, her dad and I both heard her say “Moi dodo là.” (Literally “Me sleep here.”) We’re not 100% sure though.

This morning, I had the bright idea of keeping my MP3 player (and recorder) in my hand on the way to the childminder’s, since my girl was happily babbling away. I was rewarded with three beautiful specimen of her vocabulary:

encore

water

more water

Just a shame it’s all in French. 🙁

Her active German vocabulary so far is tschüß (bye), ka for Käse (cheese) and gogo for Joghurt (yogurt). Oh well, I guess I must be patient. Besides, her passive vocabulary in German is fine. 🙂