This morning, my daughter (3½) told me excitedly she was going out with Daddy. “Where are you going?” I asked. She ran to her father to ask, and I heard his reply: “Au magasin de bricolage et au manège.” My daughter related to me: “Magasin de bricolage und Karussell!” Shows that the unimportant stuff (home […]

As I quote in my diploma theses, « Der Begriff Interferenz ist der Physik entlehnt und meint dort die Erscheinung, daß es durch die Überlagerung von Wellen (z.B. Radiowellen) zu Störungen kommt (z.B. Pfeiftöne im Radio). Auf die Situation des Zweispra­chigen übertragen meint der Begriff, daß sich Regeln der beiden Sprachen überlagern und es dadurch zu […]

Letzte Woche haben wir sehr gelacht: Ich kam von der Arbeit, als unsere Tochter schon beim Nachtisch war. Sie begrüßte mich an der Tür mit einer Eiswaffel in der Hand. Ich: “Ein Eis? Hast du ein Glück!” Sie: “Ja, ma-ya Glück, dass Papa nicht alles Eis aufgegessen!”   Anmerkung: ma-ya ist immer noch ihr Begriff […]

We finished our holidays with a few days at my mother’s who is a retired school teacher and takes care to speak a lot with our little girl. They both love looking at books together, and one richly illustrated fairy tale book is a perennial favourite. So there they were, looking at a story, and […]

Once more I’ve had proof that kids can learn a language very quickly when they want to. My daughter, who until our recent holiday in Germany had yet to say her first full German sentence, learned within the first few days that to get her ice cream after supper at our hotel, she had to […]

Yesterday evening we were sitting outside an Eiscafé where my little girl shared an icecream with her grandpa. It must have made her thirsty because she asked: “à boire”. When after several repeats of the requests no one reacted, she asked “trinken?”. Grandpa promptly asked her “Du möchtest was trinken?” and signalled for the waitress. […]

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 […]