Language Boundaries

I have been amazed that my three youngest still speak German to each other. By this same age, my older children had switched to speaking English to each other (although they continued speaking German to us). But this younger batch speaks almost exclusively German. However, this year, with Jonathan in Kindergarten and the twins having more play-dates with their English speaking friends, they all want to know how to communicate better in English. They are aware that their English isn't up to par with their peers. I've even overheard them talking about how "schwer" (hard) it is to speak English.

It's interesting to see the language boundaries they've set for themselves. The other day, we were walking home from the bus stop with neighbors and I asked my 6 year old (in German) how his day had been. He quickly responded, "Nein, nicht Deutsch". (No, not German). Clearly, he had decided that one of his language boundaries was that among school friends, he would only speak English. Our home and family has always been regarded as a purely German speaking area for the younger children. But within this German-speaking boundary, they have established a few English areas. They have established imaginative play as a time when they often (not always) speak English at home. I don't interfere, because they need a time to practice English. And so far, the English is well contained within the boundary of the game.

The following video is an excellent example of how they "play" in English but "communicate" in German. They are all playing a Dr. Suess A,B,C game with my help. This game can't very well be played in German because the letters stand for different objects (F for fork), which don't work in German. So, they have dubbed it an Englishes Spiel and play it in English.

You can hear (at least I can hear) that they have more of a "foreign" accent in English than they do in German. They are playing the game in English, but discuss the rules and questions they have in German. Simon starts out by saying "Jetzt ist dein dran" using the English syntax "Now it's your turn" instead of "Jetzt bist du dran." Often they have to ask me what a word is in English. Jonathan asks me what the letter Q is in English. He also calls the ice cream cone Eis (which is the German word for icecream). Simon struggles with the word put, he keeps saying "Tut you foot in a elephant", instead of "Put your foot on the elephant". Of course, he's thinking about the German word tun.  I also think it's interesting that when Jonathan doesn't know the word for kite, he refers to it as dragon. The German word for kite is Drachen. The German word for dragon is Drache (which is very similar). It's interesting to see him make that connection.

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.

English Gibberish

Our youngest three children speak more (and more exclusively) German than the older ones did at similar ages. I think this is kind of interesting because they hear just as much (or even more) English in the home. My husband and I and all the teenagers speak primarily English to each other in front of the little ones. So they hear plenty of English. I think the key is that we hardly ever speak English to them. They are surrounded by English, yet they hardly ever have been expected to actually communicate in English. All of the "big people" in the family (parents and teenage siblings) only address the little ones in German. So, they always have responded to us in German. If fact, up until recently, if I spoke English to them when we're out in public, they would almost always ignore me until I repeated myself in German. They have always spoken exclusively German to each other. Up until the past year (when Jonathan entered Kindergarten), they really couldn't speak much English at all.

Code-switching is when a bilingual or multilingual person to switches between languages. In our case, a major code-switching trigger is imaginative play. I noticed early on that when the kids leave the real world behind and start make believing, they very often switch into English (this happened with my first batch of kids, too).

I love this video, because it shows the three little ones "pretending" to speak English. At the time, they could speak German quite fine (for their age), but really couldn't speak much English at all. Jonathan was 4 and the twins were 2 1/2. They had decided to do some English speeches up on the laundry basket. They are speaking mostly gibberish, but they are clearly trying to imitate English sounds. Some of the English words I can hear are: "amen, bye bye, no no, sit down" and some numbers. My favorite part is when my little warrior, Simon, gets up on the basket. The only thing he likes to talk about is shooting guns, at least that's what I assume he's talking about in his funny English gibberish.

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.