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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Yesterday I took my now-almost-4-year-old daughter to the playground at the end of the street where I grew up and where my mom still lives. We’d been there before on a previous visit, it’s a nice little playground for younger kids, but this was the first time we went there and other kids (and moms) […]

Today, my daughter had a chocolate for dessert and afterwards, tried to put the ribbon back around the chocolate box. It’s a very tight ribbon, but yesterday she succeeded. Today, after quite some struggling, she declared: “Für die große Schule muss man schreiben, vorlesen und Schokolade essen, und dann wieder zumachen.” “At the big [elementary] […]

These days, I often find myself running for a pen and paper. Any pen and (virtually) any paper will do because the main thing is to write down as quickly as possible what my daughter (3½) just said. Why? Because half a minute later I will only remember what she said, but not how she […]

One aspect of going home when you are the minority language parent is realising that “people understand me here”. By that I mean that I’m so used to no one around us understanding what I say to my three-year-old in public that I have to do a double-take when I’m back home and suddenly remember […]