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 […]
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Our family is quite a bit international, or European at least: In addition to German (Mom) and French (Dad), there is D., the second husband of my widowed mother-in-law, who is from Turkey, and my divorced father’s partner A., who is from Lithuania. Yesterday, during a car ride, my daughter and I were playing a […]
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The other day, while on holidays in Germany, we were walking through a pedestrian shopping street in Flensburg, the northernmost city in Germany. I told Daddy: “Admire les jolies façades !” (Admire the nice façades!) Which he dutifully did. (They were nice.) My words prompted my 4-year-old daughter to add: “Regardez ce magnifique hélicoptère !” […]
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What do you do when there is no word to express what you want to say? And when on top of that you are not quite four years old? My daughter takes advantage of her dual vocabulary and borrows from the other language when she doesn’t know a word. She shows off her new long […]
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The other day I was preparing my daughter for our upcoming dentist appointment. She had accompanied me to every single check-up since she was born, and half a year ago, she’d had her first very own check-up. As a reward, the dentist had let her choose a little plastic ring. So I reminded her of […]
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Every parent, it seems, has a story of how their kid used a word or expression (usually a swearword) they weren’t supposed to know, which then begs the question: “Where did s/he hear that?” When the word or expression in question happens to be in the minority language (ml), the field of possible candidates is […]
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Funny that this story coincides with German National Unity Day (today, October 3rd). My daughter and I found a Euro coin on the sidewalk. Usually it’s her who finds money, and it goes into her piggy bank (which is really a cow-y bank, but you might have guessed that). Anyway, she looked at the back […]
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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 […]
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A multilingual friend of mine whom I interviewed for this blog a while ago read my recent post asking Why not English? Here’s her reaction: Forget English, German is the tongue that we all wish to know, to emigrate to the country of jobs and money!!! (that’s what they say everyday on Spanish TV). But […]
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You might have noticed we like cows. The other day, near my aunt’s, we drove past the local elementary school. Next to it was a farm, and two young cows were curiously looking through the fence. (Maybe they were hoping, like Pippi Longstocking, that some wisdom would come out the window and stick with them.) […]
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