Summer holidays are full of fun and an occasion to try out new things. When on the third day in our German holiday resort, the kids in the surrounding holiday homes were outside playing after supper, our 5-year-old decided she wanted to join them on skates. (She’d only skated once so far.) So that’s what she did. When two older boys skated by on the small path between the lawns, she considered they weren’t careful enough and gave them a piece of her mind – in German!
Daddy was filming the whole scene from our balcony:

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 my 5-year-old daughter a snack after her swim course. She’d gone directly to the kids’ club, and when I picked her up there, she begged for a bretzel, which was sold on the premises. Despite Daddy waiting with lunch, I felt guilty enough about the forgotten snack (swimming makes hungry!) to give in. So I put a two-euro coin into her hands. But she didn’t know where to buy them. I told her to go ask if she wanted one. She went over to the kids’ club counter and asked the group leader who directed her to the reception desk. I told her to go ahead while I closed my bag. By the time I caught up, she’d already purchased her bretzel (which was still warm). A yummy reward for active use of the minority language, right?

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, sweetie, you know, we’re in Germany. 🙂

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 me, but it took me a while to find a way to edit the names out. (I have no experience with audio and video editing, so I needed help.)
It is, of course, in our minority language (German), and if you do understand that language and listen to it all the way through, I would like to point out that my daughter’s mistake with the German word for “birds” is a pure grammar error, not using a word with an entirely different meaning that she would never have heard in our household anyway (nor anywhere else, I should hope).

Enjoy!

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 picking up our biweekly fruit basket at the market downstairs, she asked why I hadn’t come up and then gone to pick up the basket with her. I said I’d forgotten, and “besides, you’re already in your pyjamas”. “Ich pouvais doch was überziehen.” (I could have put on some clothes over the pyjamas.) The “could” is still in French for some reason (as are a number of apparently specific words), but what impressed me was the “überziehen”. I really need to write such words down, because without any notes, I just have this general impression that her vocabulary is getting more sophisticated. Will try harder.

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 day after tomorrow is über-übermorgen.

The other day, we were out and about with my dad, or Opa to my daughter (who is almost five now). After visiting a sailing ship at the old port in my hometown, she wanted to know what we’d do next. We told her. She wanted to know what we’d do after that: “Und dann?” (And then?) We told her. But it seemed she wanted the entire day’s program, for her next question was “Und über-dann?”

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 1

interview part 2

interview part 3

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 almost non-stop, and quickly finding out they had a common interest: the FROZEN movie.

My daughter also told everything about flower bulbs that she had learned at school when they visited a tulip field:

On our last day in town, we went on a canal cruise, unfortunately without the other girl and her family. However, we happened to be seated across from a family with a girl also only slightly older than our own. The family hailed from Guernsey and didn’t speak French (or German). When the girls became bored with the cruise, the lack of a shared language didn’t stop them from playing a video game together.

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 story that mentioned a slow-worm, with a character explaining, “That’s not a snake, that’s a lizard.”
Which in German reads as “Das ist keine Schlange, das ist eine Echse.”

Eine Echse:

My daughter: “Eine Hexe?”

Eine Hexe:

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 object.
This is what our first full page looked like:

We continued, eventually calling upon the Duden der deutschen Rechtschreibung, and now have two more pages: