Sunday 1 November 2009

all about bilingualism

It's this time of the month again and apologies for the slight delay in letting everyone know about this month's carnival of raising bilingual children (and raising bilingual kids is a carnival indeed) - had a busy weekend what with Halloween carving and cooking/baking for our mummy friends' Halloween Party, the party itself, nephew staying for a sleepover and both Cubling and nephew generally running wild for delight of spending the weekend with one another.

So to keep you entertained until I find the time to pull together a post, check Bilingual For Fun out for an impressive carnival. If you want to keep updated on future carnivals, sign up for a newsletter or view the carnival schedule, including links to the previous carnivals. You can even sign up to host it in the future.

Here are our current favourite utterances:
What does that say? What's that for? Wha'? (re the latter: she used to say "I here" when called. Now she says wha'? Not exactly an improvement)
I backe backe Kuchen maken.
Look! It's a Leiter! (me: what???? There's no ladder anywhere to be seen!) In Englisch fence. Daddy say fence. Mummy say Leiter. (no, not quite, Leiter is ladder, and fence is Zaun, but I appreciate your ability to visually transpose objects by 90 degrees)
Big one - Kleine one
This is very very schwer/heiss!
Want mehr Milch!
Mummy lesen books, Daddy go weg. (her way of saying good night daddy, I love you)
Lass das bitte!!!!
Fish finger auf Grund geflogen. (fish finger fell on the ground - literally, flew to the ground. I can't help but imaging fish fingers with wings. And I don't think I've ever used the word "Grund" and have no idea where it came from)
I no want it, is crunchy (anything crunchy is BAD, and if it's not crunchy, it's crunchy because she doesn't want to eat it, however we have first grape eating success at 2 years 7 months, hurraym and grapes are crunchy, aren't they?)
Look! Erbse! (she's pointing at yet another collection of red berries on some bush... I'm running out of energy explaining that peas are green and grow in pods and not red and growing on trees)
Want pumpkin sehen. Kuerbis. (she likes her friendly pumpkin and regularly wants to check up on him - I don't think we can get rid of him just yet).

We're still loving songs. So much so that monolingual nephew can now also sing about 5 German songs perfectly.
Her imagination has taken off. Tonight, there was a big imaginary bin beside her bed. And she made us all go in there and put the lid back on. Not quite sure what that tells us.

5 comments:

f. pea said...

Ha! This made me lachen!

Zoe said...

Yes - great post - just swap Dutch for German and it could be our house :-) Oh, and I wondered if you could help - I'm looking for a nice book about Saint Martin - although not widespread in the Netherlands, the part where my hubby grew up (around Groningen) does celebrate Sint Maarten with lanterns and the gathering of sweets from neighbours, and we're trying to find a nice book about it. The only Dutch ones I've found are ghastly (horrible illustrations) but perhaps there's a german book that is great? No probs if it is only available in German - we'd just (loosely) translate! Hope you can help :-)

cartside said...

Zoe, sorry I don't know of a nice book about Sint/Saint/Sankt Martin/Maarten. I'd suggest Wikipedia, maybe the German or French site for in depth info and they may have book references. I think the historical Saint Martin was a French bishop, so it's a French tradition which travelled north along the Rhine, in Catholic parts of Germany I would assume (although I'm not sure if it is celebrated in Eastern parts of Germany).

Zoe said...

Thanks for the suggestions :-)

Metropolitan Mum said...

HAHAHA. Loved the bin. That's hilarious. I am really looking forward to the years to come!

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