Yes, I’m jumping up and down in my excitement. So what was the big thing? My little girl has been peppering her French sentences with German words for a month or two now (more markedly since those two brief visits to Germany in May), but the full “pure” German sentence remained elusive. Now today we’d […]

Yesterday, my girl surprised me once again with a stunning leap between languages similar to the pasta & fries one. Daddy had told her today they would be going to the Cité des Enfants, a great hands-on experience for 2-to-7-year-olds (another section is geared at 5-to-12-year-olds) at La Villette. Cité des Enfants literally translates to […]

Sometimes I feel sorry for my daughter when she tries repeatedly to tell me something in German, and I don’t get it. The other day, she outright shouted “fourchette!” at me when I didn’t get her request for a “Gabel” (fork). But how was I to understand that the first thing she said to me […]

Our little girl made me laugh the other day when she took up an expression we’ve been using with her more or less since birth – saying “hoch den Popo” as we lift her legs to put the diaper in place underneath. She still needs a diaper for the night these days, and recently she’s […]

You know we practise the principle of “one person one language” (or “one parent one language”) at home, that is, Daddy speaks French and Mommy speaks German. Yesterday evening I realised there is another person and, yes, another language, present in the household, when I said “Alright!” to my daughter. “Toi dis pas alright. Dora […]

When this afternoon, returning to the car at a shopping centre, our little girl asked about “les pâtes”, we thought she was talking about dinner. But when the question came again, “les pâtes pour la piscine” (the pasta for the swimming pool) this time, we had to dig a little deeper. Take a guess before […]

The other day it hit me again how most of the German words our now three-year-old uses in her mixed sentences are either nouns or adjectives. A linguist could probably give me a complicated explanation, but I’ll stick with the simple one that they are easier to use than verbs. Examples? Donne-moi la Buch! (By […]

My little girl just turned three, and she talks a lot – in French, but liberally sprinkled with German words, such as: “Donne-moi da [das] Buch.” If you ask her “How does mommy say?”, she’ll immediately provide German words for such terms as aujourd’hui – heute (today), jaune – gelb (yellow) or hippo – Nilpferd […]

The other day we met our former neighbours in the playground. The mom is German too, and her son is three years older than my girl and already fluently bilingual. We used to meet frequently when they still lived next door. The kids played together and we talked until it was time to leave. As […]

One of the cutest expressions from my little girl was her name for this: “bébé Maria” Yesterday she called it a “Marienkäfer”. And today she asked me for “Apfelsaft” instead of her usual “jus pomme”. Where does time go?