24 weeks: Teil drei.
As I mentioned in my last post, my husband and I decided that our language at home would be German. Now, it’s not like this was an arbitrary decision – my husband is German after all, and giving our children multiple languages is something we think is a wonderful gift, but it’s still quite something for me to get my head around, mainly because it’s my head that is going to be doing a lot of work to get itself around it (not the idea of it, but the actual doing of it).
Now, understand, I do speak passable German, particularly when I’m comfortable, but I haven’t been speaking it for all that long. In high school and college, I spoke pretty fluent Spanish, decent French, and a touch of German (though not showing up for class did manage to earn me a D in first semester German as well as a complete inability to actually communicate with anyone). I managed to retain, and occasionally use, Spanish and French right up to the point that I became an au pair in Holland.
When I went to Holland, I spoke absolutely no Dutch beyond a few stupid phrases in my “Teach Yourself Dutch” book (e.g. “Waar is de winkelstraat?”, meaning “Where is the shopping street?”- if you read my last post, you will understand exactly how often I used that phrase), and I didn’t really plan to learn Dutch. I’d wanted to go to Spain, but the program I went on had just switched their Spain exchange programs to “study only”, so I picked somewhere where one wasn’t required to have a preexisting knowledge of the language, and off I went.
And that turned out to be the most awesome thing ever. Because Noor and Thijs, the (then) 3 and 6-year-old children in the family, taught me to speak Dutch just by talking with me and playing and being totally awesome through the ins-and-outs of every day life. I admit that I never got really comfortable with adults, although I did start making myself speak with shopkeepers in Dutch, but I think in the end I had a relatively decent degree of fluency going. I certainly surprised the grandparents… Unfortunately, though, the interference of Dutch with all of the other languages I’d learned, since I could really think pretty well in Dutch due to the immersion, managed to pretty much obliterate my ability to speak the other languages. I can get by in Spanish all right if I’m in the right frame of mind, and I can certainly still understand people, but more often than not, when I speak Spanish now, a word will pop out in one of the other languages I know (for a long while it was Dutch – now it’s German), and the same thing tends to happen in Dutch (which I don’t really use anymore anyway, and this makes me sad). And French? I can read it, but I can barely understand it, and I certainly can’t say much of anything. As the old lady I am, I really screw up the vowels, even though I was pretty good with them at 18. Getting old sucks like that.
The upshot of this is that while I certainly “know” a lot of other languages (even if what I remember of Japanese and Old Norse/Icelandic don’t really count), I have a very hard time using any of them. And since I only really started studying German for real about 4 years ago (my semester in college and three weeks in high school certainly don’t count), and only really hardcore for maybe a total of a year of that time, if that, the idea of being the primary caregiver in that language is just a little daunting.
Now, I do give myself some credit. My husband and in-laws may be highly critical of my German (my parents-in-law are highly critical of everything, so this is nothing new), but I certainly speak well enough to get by in most situations, and I am not actually afraid of being a non-native speaker in front of my son. As long as he gets consistent native-speaker input (which he will from my husband), he’ll pick up correct forms, even if he hears incorrect ones from me. And while I do make mistakes, my German has improved a great deal in the last year. I find it extremely tiring to have adult conversations about politics and computer science in German (topics which, quite frankly, occupy a big part of the adult conversation in this house), but come on… those are tiring enough topics in English. I am sure Small Monster and I will get by just fine – but it is something that is going to take a lot of work on my part.
The linguist in me is looking forward to it, and the mama in me who wants to have the closeness being able to speak fluently with one’s child in one’s own tongue allows and to communicate the culture that goes along with it knows that since we’ve decided we’ll speak English outside the home (in the park, with friends, etc.), there is a pressure release valve for me too. If the German is too much for me one morning, a walk to the park will be just the thing. But I’ve always found that living in another language that you don’t speak extremely well is physically exhausting for a while, and it’s not like there won’t be enough to exhaust us then anyway.
Now, a lot of families do what is called One Parent, One Language (OPOL). OPOL, as you might guess from the name, basically specifies that each parent speaks his native language with the child, and this system works very well for lots of families, so I’m totally not knocking it. But while OPOL is really appealing to the part of me that is scared to deal of trying to switch to another language with my husband when our relationship has always been in English, it would be really hard for us to pull this off in a majority English-speaking environment and still ensure our child got enough exposure to German. But since Christian and I speak English with each other almost exclusively and I will be the primary caregiver, we wanted to create an environment where our child would be able to hear conversation in both languages, not just input from one parent, and this for us means switching our language to German. (That’s the part I’m really scared of…) Since the outside world will give us English and English conversation, we’re basically responsible for German and German conversation, and since I’ll be home with the baby most of the day, it just seemed to make more sense to us to make sure the baby was hearing the minority language for most of that time, since when he gets older, most of his input will be in the majority language from everywhere else. So we’re doing what called is Minority Language at Home (ML@H), and we’re ok with that.
So this is why I bought a bunch of books of children’s music/games/rhymes in German today; I already knew that playrhymes and games have a function when children acquire a language, and I sort of felt like since singing Dutch children’s songs and playing games like that helped me, as an adult, pick up a language just from immersion, it made sense to have those in the bag before I was one of the people teaching my child German. Even if I occasionally screw up gender and case, pretty soon, I’m going to be living in German-world. And that’s both really cool and terribly mind-blowing.
Armes kleines Monster…
Professional computer geek and linguist living in Germany, doing infosec stuff and being the freakiest mother ever.
We are OPOL. I speak French to Sacha while Tony speaks in English. My first language was French, as my mother is francophone, but I simultaneously learned English, as my father was anglophone. This is what I hope to pass on to Sacha and my future kids. My French stayed with me, and I ended up becoming a French immersion teacher. It is definitely NOT my most comfortable language, but after teaching in it and forcing myself to speak French to Sacha for the first few weeks, it has become second nature.
Good luck!
That’s awesome
I’m just going to try to take it as it comes!