How it all began...with Baby Ben!

I came across this little snippet from almost 25 years ago. It reminded me how far we've come in the last 25 years. I remember having no idea if our little German experiment would work. Ben was our first child. We were college students at the time and dirt poor and so we only owned a handful of German books. But we read them a lot. We loved the picture dictionary books. The book that I'm reading to him in the video really helped us all to improve our German vocab.

My little Baby Ben is turning 25 this year and he is still fluent in German. When he calls home, he talks to his little siblings in German. In this video, he is saying some of his first German words. It was fun for me to find this video of my sweet little baby Ben and to remember our early years of non-native bilingual parenting. During these years, we were still very unsure of ourselves. We weren't sure if we were going to mess up our kids or if we'd succeed. But I still remember the thrill of hearing Ben respond to us in German. It was so exciting for us.

The following video is only a year later, and Ben's vocab and his ability to communicate have increased tremendously. By this age, he spoke almost exclusively German to us. The whole non-native bilingual parenting thing was still so new. Each day, we seemed to be forging into unknown territory. It's interesting how much easier and more comfortable we got as more and more kids came along. It just makes me so grateful that we stuck with it and continued, even when we weren't 100% sure of the outcome. And, it's just so fun to look back and see the beginning stages of our non-native bilingual experiment!!

Starting Early is Key!

We always tend drift towards the language that comes more naturally and feels most comfortable. Because of this, it’s crucial establish your target language as early as possible.

It’s hard to imagine that speaking your foreign language will ever feel comfortable, but it definitely can. Be patient.

The concept of starting early actually benefits the parent more than the child. It’s all about establishing habits. By speaking to your newborn in the target language, you are training yourself and familiarizing yourself with the language. It can feel strange to speak to a 3 month old baby in a foreign language, especially, since that baby does not understand what you are saying and is not able to respond. But, by using the target language, you are establishing a relationship in that particular language. The more you use the language when talking and interacting with your baby, the more comfortable you will start to feel in the target language. And by the time your baby reaches the age where he or she can understand and even respond to your words, your new language will feel quite natural. In fact, it will soon feel so comfortable, that the thought of speaking your native language to your child will feel awkward and uncomfortable.

I remember being astounded by this concept with own children. How could speaking my own native language to my children feel uncomfortable? And how did my non-native language become the more natural and familiar mode of communication? It was at this point, that I realized that we had succeeded in truly implementing our target language. Speaking the target language was no longer something on our long list of things we were trying to accomplish. It was just the way we did things. Once we got the ball rolling, we didn’t really even think about it.  Speaking German was how we rolled. It was and is our normal way of communicating. 

The sooner you establish your target language as the “natural” mode of communication, the better. The longer you wait, the harder it will get. This is because relationships are partly defined by language. The language you use in a particular relationship become a powerful habit. To change that language habit takes extra work. For instance, if you’ve been speaking your native language with your daughter until age 5 and then you try to get her to switch to a different language, she will probably resist. Even if she wants to learn the target language, it will require so much effort and feel so strange that she will likely give up and resort to the easier language. That’s why it’s so important to start early. Establishing your target language as the “normal” mode of communication from the get-go is way easier than trying to switch languages later on. Kids (and adults) don’t want to think about language. It’s a tool used to communicate. We don’t want to think about our tools, we just want to use the one that gets the job done with the least amount of effort. This is the reason we tend to always revert to the language that feels more natural. To do anything else requires extra work and effort. 

New Featured Non-Native Bilingual Family!

In an effort to try and connect the many families who are raising children in a language that is non-native to the parents, we are featuring some of these families on our new website:

Bringing Up Bilingual Babies

Enriching the Lives of Children and Families through

Non-Native Bilingual Parenting

This month's featured family consists of Tamara, Geoff and their daughter Kaya. They are very familiar to most non-native bilingual bloggers since Tamara has been blogging her non-native bilingual journey for many years now. Tamara and Geoff are both native English speakers residing in the United States. Tamara is successfully raising their daughter in her non-native German.

Tamara was kind enough to share some of her experiences and advice in an article that we recently posted. I loved her last piece of advice, which basically was to worry less and enjoy more. I think that is one of the best gems of wisdom that could be passed on to any parent who is
embarking on the journey of non-native bilingual parenting.

Read Tamara's article: Tamara and Geoff

Link to Tamara's Blog: Non-Native Bilingualism

It has been so enjoyable for me to learn about other families who are also raising their children in a foreign language. I love seeing the similarities. So many of us have worried, stressed and fretted about similar situations and have enjoyed the same feelings of success as our children have blossomed and have grown to love and understand another culture, language and people.

Thank Goodness for Technology (when you're parenting in your non-native language)

The boys play a German computer game. Love how the stuffed kitty
is hanging by its tail and watching. 

Having had the experience of raising bilingual kids in the 1990's as well as in the 2010's, I must say that I've been very grateful for the help of technology in both eras. In the 1990's I was very grateful for anything German that I could get my hands on. It was a LOT harder to get the things that I wanted than it is today. For example, in order to be able to watch German children's videos. First, I had to find someone who was going to Germany who could buy a video cassette for me. Of course, that video (being in PAL format, used in Europe) wouldn't play on my American (NTSC) video player. So, I would have to find someone who owned a (very expensive) PAL/NTSC conversion video player. Thankfully, the university I was attending owned such a player, so I was able to convert a few videos. And, boy, was I grateful for each and every one of my German videos. The first movie we had was Dumbo. My little Ben watched his German Dumbo every afternoon before he took a nap. Later, I found friends who had NTSC/PAL video players/converters and our small German video library slowly grew. Eventually, the price came down enough that we got our own machine. Our little library become much bigger. We acquired  a whole slew of Disney videos. We also picked up traditional German children's shows along the way, like Loewenzahn, Petzi, and Sendung mit der Maus.

With our younger batch of kids we've had so, so much more technology available to us. With the internet, it's so much easier to order videos.  And the PAL video players are very cheap now. I have found that Abe Books carries lots of German materials and their shipping to the US is very reasonable. But, lately, I have almost stopped buying videos altogether, because we can find so many shows on YouTube. We can also watch a whole bunch of children's shows, including our all time favorite, Sendung mit dem Elefanten, on Kika. (KiKA Link). KiKA is a German children's TV network.

We have found lots of fun computer sites that help the kids to develop their German. Many of these resources are pinned on my Pinterest board (see right column). One of our favorites is Toggolino. You pay a yearly subscription, but that gets you access to tons of different educational software games. My kids absolutely love it. They never get tired of it because there are so many different games and new ones are constantly being added. I love all the educational software available to help the kids learn to read and write in German. 

Another source of German, which technology has made much easier to acquire, is music and audio books. I used to order cassette tapes through catalogs. Now, I can download just about anything I want. We love our German children's music. We have it playing all the time. Our favorite artist is Rolf Zukowski. The kids love to sing along to his songs. We also love to listen to audio books in the car. I was so pleased to find that I could open a German Audible account and order just about any audio book I wanted. I don't know if you younger moms appreciate all this as much as us older moms. But, just imagine trying to get your hands on material in your target language without the internet. Having access to so much information is just so helpful when you're parenting in your non-native language!!

So, how has access to all this technology helped us to raise children in our non-native language? Well, most of all, it has exposed our kids to lots and lots of (natively) spoken German, which is something they desperately need since our German is far from perfect. Through the many forms of media, they are exposed to complex sentence structures, syntax, different dialects, fixed expressions, and many other linguistic nuances that they can’t pick up from us, their parents, because we are not native speakers. On numerous occasions, I’ve heard my kids use phrases that they picked up from a German TV show or a German song…phrases that neither Karl nor I have ever used. And whenever that happens, I am reminded of just how much technology has helped my children understand and speak better German.

Not only does all this exposure help their language, it also makes them feel like they are part of a bigger group. My kids have very few friends who speak German. We just don’t come in contact with many Germans on a day to day basis. For this reason, it really helps them to see other kids speaking German on TV. When they watch a German show and see all the characters speaking German, it helps them to realize that they are not the only ones speaking this funny language. It also helps with the “cool factor” of the language. If your favorite cartoon character speaks German, then maybe German is a cool language!

And on top of helping their language AND helping them to love the language, the other benefit that I’ve seen from exposing our kids to lots of German videos, is that they are learning about German culture. This culture learning comes especially from shows with “real” actors (rather than cartoons). One culturally educational series that our young kids enjoy are the “Sachgeschichten” on Sendung mit der Maus. These are excerpts that can be compared to the How It’s Made series, except it’s geared towards little kids. My older girls adore the Sissi movie about Empress of Austria. It’s packed with history and culture. And what girl doesn’t love the beautiful flouncy dresses and elaborate hairstyles of the Georgian era?

When you're raising your kids in a language that is foreign to you, you are going to make mistakes--lots of them! You will sound awkward at times and you'll be just plain wrong at other times. It just makes sense to make sure that you are not the only source of the target language. You're going to want to surround your children with as many native speakers as possible. When you're facing a huge project (and I think raising your kids in a foreign language counts as a huge project), you want as much help as you can get. Thank goodness for the many foreign language resources that technology has put at our fingertips!

It's all a matter of habit and consistency...

Why is it SO much easier to introduce a minority language at birth? Why is it so hard to introduce the language later? I guess, I've never seen a family (with older children) able to make a deliberate switch from speaking the majority (community) language to only speaking the minority (target) language at home. It's incredibly hard to wake up one morning and say, "OK, from here on out we will all only speak Spanish (German, Italian, etc) to each other." Why is this so hard?
I think it's because we are such creatures of habit. We don't like to spend much time thinking 'about' language. Language is a tool we use to communicate. When we pick up a hammer, we don't spend much time thinking about that hammer. We're spending our time thinking about what we're going to accomplish with the hammer. It's the same with language. We don't want to waste our time thinking about the words and syntax that we will use, we mostly are thinking about communicating a certain thought. And usually, we prefer to use the most efficient tool (or language) to which we have access.
The reason why it's so effective to introduce a minority language early, is because we establish language patterns and routines which become natural and efficient. If we've been using certain words and phrases for certain routines since birth, then each time we encounter that particular routine, it will trigger those particular words and phrases.
I've seen this in action with my older kids. We started off speaking only German to all of our children. As they entered their teen years, our family language had mostly switched to English (the community language). They retained their ability to understand and speak German, they just didn't use German much at home, with the exception of certain daily and weekly routines. Because the German language had been so ingrained in conjunction with those routines, they almost always used German in those situations.
The other reason it's easier to start out with the target language, is because it just makes the whole bilingual rearing so, so, so much easier. I think about my youngest three children. They have been speaking exclusively German since birth. I don't even have to make an effort to get them to speak German, they just do it. It's what comes naturally to them.
So, if anyone were to ask me for advice on how to to raise children in a non-native language, I would tell them to start at birth. That way, you're learning right along with the children and you're establishing all your family routines in the target language which makes raising bilingual children so much easier and sets you up for success!!

Define Success

I think I have a unique bilingual parent perspective. Currently, I am poised between my two batches of children. The first batch (5 kids) have pretty much been raised. My oldest three have already left the house. If they are going to progress in German, it will be on their own...my job is done. Even the two teenagers that are still living at home are pretty much "done" when it comes to learning German. If they want to learn more German, they will take classes or go to Germany. They've learned what they can from me.

The second batch, however is still a work in progress. We're still deep in the bilingual trenches. The wonderful thing about raising a second batch of bilingual children is that, this time, I have no worries or doubts. I've done it all before and I know what worked and what didn't work so well. I also know where I need to improve. I'm not so worried about the younger children's English development, because we found that the first batch learned English just fine--in fact, some of them are quite gifted--so we are pretty sure that our younger batch of kids will be speaking English with native-like fluency before long. It's comforting to have been down this road before. I've defined our bilingual goals, I know what methods we are going to use and I feel confident that we're achieving our goals (more or less).

Now, let me just say that I never had a bilingual goal of raising children who speak perfect German. That would be quite unrealistic, since neither my husband nor I speak perfect children. The most we could could hope for would be children who could speak our own level of German. But, even that would be asking a lot, since I actually lived in Germany for some time and studied it in college...and they never have. So, what were/are our goals and did we meet them?

Our goals were to give them the German language and culture. Personally, I wanted my children to be able to identify with my idyllic childhood which I spent on a German Bauernhof in Bavaria. I wanted them to love the German Christmas traditions. I wanted them to grow up knowing that the world was bigger than their back yard and to understand that there are different ways of doing things, different ways of thinking and different ways of speaking and that they are all good. I knew that their German would be imperfect. I knew that they would make grammar mistakes (many of which they would learn from me), but I also knew that I'd rather give them my imperfect German and everything that goes with that, than not give them any German at all.

So, have we been successful? According to my own definition: YES. Our older children, who have already been raised can actually speak German. They can understand almost anything. They can express ideas and make themselves understood. They each have different levels of German. Some of them are naturally more gifted in language than others. Their pronunciation ranges from decent to quite good. Their German is far from perfect. They make grammatical mistakes all the time. If they were to take German in college, they would struggle with the grammar, but they would be able to out-speak and out-comprehend many of their classmates. And I feel certain, that they would be able to learn the grammar quickly, given the opportunity. They will probably have to "unlearn" some incorrect things that they learned in our home, but that's OK.

Now, having already done the "bilingual parenting thing" once, I actually have set my sites just slightly higher for this second batch of kids. I am hoping to help the younger children reach a higher level of German literacy than we reached with the older children. I would like to actually teach them formal grammar and help them learn how to read and write in German.

So, if success is defined by having perfectly bilingual children who speak both languages equally well and native-like, then, no, we haven't been successful. But if success is defined as setting and reaching goals and giving your children a wonderful gift of culture and language that will forever be a part of them, then, YES, we have been successful. In fact, the first time around was so amazing and successful, that we decided to do the whole thing again. And if that's not a sign of success, then I don't know what is.

When did we start speaking the minority language (German) to our children?

We had decided that we would speak German to our first child before he was born. We came to that decision while I was still expecting. But when our little Benjamin was born, it wasn't so easy. Neither of us was in the habit of speaking German to babies. It was hard to make ourselves speak to our little baby in a foreign language. It didn't feel comfortable or natural. I didn't even really know how to speak 'to a baby' in German. I didn't know all the little baby words.

The first 4 months, we really struggled with speaking German to Ben. He didn't really respond much to our words, so we felt silly talking baby talk in German. But we still tried. It helped us to remember to speak German when we said his name with the German pronunciation. By 6 months, we mostly addressed him in German. At this point, I had no idea whether he would learn German or not. Karl and I spoke only English to each other. Would our little baby pick up the language he constantly heard in his environment (English) or would he actually speak in the language in which we spoke to him (German)? I really had no idea.

But early on, we noticed that he seemed to understand German better than English. It was fun to see that he actually responded to German. We were hopeful and continued to always talk to him in German. Karl's vocabulary really grew as he learned lots of new words. Karl was learning German right along with Benjamin, which was fun for all of us.

In this video (from our college days), you can see that we have already switched to speaking only German to Benjamin by the time he was 10 months. I think it was important that we were speaking the minority language to him well before he was able to produce words himself. You can also see that my German was not perfect.

Lullabies and Nursery Rhymes

When our first child, Benjamin, was born, I was really at a loss as to how to talk to or interact with a baby in German. I wanted to be able to sing German lullabies, but I didn't know any. I had grown up in an English speaking household and my mother had only sung English lullabies to me and my siblings. Even though it seemed strange to sing to my baby in a foreign language, I had decided that I was going to go ahead with our little "German experiment" no matter what, so I started looking for German lullabies to learn. This was before the internet, so I went to the library and checked out German song books. I took them home and, because we were poor college students and didn't own a piano, I played the melody of each lullaby on my recorder and worked on memorizing the words. I would sit in my recliner, as I nursed my little baby, holding the lullaby sheet music and sing my newly learned songs.

I had the same problem with nursery rhymes. As a mommy, I wanted to do little rhymes like: "This little piggy went to market", as I washed his little feet. So, once again, I hit the library and the college bookstore, looking for any material I could use. I collected all the little nursery rhymes and practiced them at home with my sweet little baby.

Looking back, I remember everything feeling so foreign and unnatural as I learned my new lullabies. I had never heard them sung and they didn't have that familiar feel. But, now over 20 years later, those very same lullabies are my children's most precious German memories. They love that they have their very own special lullabies. These lullabies and nursery rhymes are what set our family apart from the others. These are "our" songs and our rhymes and they are very special to us.

Why we chose the ML@H method

After researching the different ways to raise bilingual children, we decided that both of us would speak the target (minority) language to the children, which in our case was German. This is also known as the ML@H (Minority Language at Home) method. It seemed like it would be the most effective method for our family. Now, we didn't come to this decision easily. Yes, I spoke German pretty well, but Karl didn't speak it quite as fluently. He had taken several college German classes, but had never been to Germany. He actually minored in French. He had spent 2 years in France (on an LDS mission) and spoke much better French than German. We played with the idea of having Karl speak French to the children, while I spoke German, but after giving it some thought, we decided that we might be more successful if we both spoke the same language.

Having us both speak the minority language at home made sense to me. I figured that neither of us should speak English, because the children would get enough English from living in an English-speaking community. I assumed that they would learn English just fine from their surroundings, just like I had learned German while living in Germany as a child. I wasn't 100% sure that my children would acquire English perfectly, but we decided to take the risk.

Another reason we felt like we should both speak German, was that with both of us speaking the minority language (German), we thought it would be easier for us to counteract the huge influence of the majority language (English). If English were spoken by one parent in the home (especially if it's both parents' native language and the community language), we felt that it would be very hard to keep it from becoming the main household language. I assumed that if one of us spoke English and the other German, that the children would feel like they had a choice of which language to speak and, given such a choice, I assumed that they would almost certainly choose English.

I knew that we had to push German 100% during the toddler and preschool years. I wasn't sure what would happen when we sent our children to school, but I knew that once they started school that they would be hearing more English than German and that English would start to become the dominant language. We decided to start speaking German right from the start and not to wait a few years until they learned English. Once again, its all about taking away the children's choices...lol. If you start them in the minority language and it's the only language they know, then they really don't have a choice as to what language they will speak. But given a choice, I knew from other families' experiences, that the children often chose to speak the dominant, or community language rather than the target, or minority, language..

Of course, these were all assumptions at the time. We didn't really know what would happen since we didn't know anyone else in our situation. We knew other bilingual families, but none where both parents were speaking a non-native language. In the end, we made our decisions based on a gut feeling that this whole bilingual experiment would be a good experience and that we wouldn't ruin or harm any of our children in the process. And now, 8 bilingual children and 20+ years later, I am happy to report that our assumptions and methods actually worked with hardly any children ruined in the process. We have thoroughly enjoyed our bilingual adventure and, given the choice, would do it all over again.

OPOL or ML@H

So, once the decision had been made to raise our children bilingually, we had to decide exactly how we were going to do it. There are two basic theories or methods when it comes to raising bilingual children.

In a bi-cultural family, where each parent speaks a different native language, the OPOL or One Person, One Language is, by far, the most popular choice, because each parent just speaks his/her own native language to the child and the child is exposed to both languages. In our minds, the ML@H, or Minority Language at Home seemed to make more sense. I'll discuss the reasons why we chose ML@H in later post, but in the meantime, here is a good description of both methods from Omniglot.com.

1. One Person, One Language (OPOL) is the most common family language system in use. For instance, Kees speaks his native Dutch, while his wife speaks English. Each parent or caregiver consistently speaks only one language to the child. Sometimes OPOL requires extra "language supplements," such as playgroups, visits from family, a trip to the country, or a native speaking nanny or au-pair. It helps tremendously for your child to hear that his parent isn't the only one who speaks this language. Kids are savvy little creatures who are quite capable of reasoning that they don't really need to know a language if it is only spoken by one other person.
2. A second option, slightly less common but tremendously successful is Minority Language at Home (ML@H). It simply means that everyone speaks the minority language at home, even if this language is not the native language of both parents. It is probably the most reliable method for raising truly native speaking children since it ensures consistent interaction from birth until the child leaves home. However, the ML@H parent has to be able to quell doubts and stay the course unwaveringly. When your child isn't speaking the community language on the same level as his or her monolingual peers (generally the ML@H child doesn't reach parity with them until around 5 years of age), it's difficult not to worry. The McColloughs in Germany remember "We were watching other children jabbering away in complete German sentences, while Patrick seemed incapable of getting out two or three connected words." Within months after starting preschool, however, he had transformed completely. "Now he can't stop talking in either language." Even when you know that your child is going to catch up, it can be daunting to watch him struggle. Some parents fear that he will never learn the primary language, even though this really only occurs when children are isolated from the primary language within a minority speaking community.

Ager, Simon: Citing Sources: [http://www.omniglot.com/language/articles/bilingualkids4.htm]: para. 3-4: [Jan10, 2014]

There are many factors to take into consideration when deciding on which method to implement in your family. One of these factors is whether or not both parents can speak the target language and another is the family's country of residence. Rather than explore all the factors, I will try to explain the reasons why we felt that the ML@H method would be better choice for us. (stay tuned for the next post)