SylkeWeb – Sylke’s mutterings to herself on an island not so far away

So what's going on you must be wondering. Is he speaking English now? Yes, he is!

Yannick has been growing up in the UK in a German speaking family. The first two and a half years of his life, Frank and I only spoke German to him when we were on our own. I would occasionally say something in English but more by accident when in English speaking company. We have a number of English friends so we were never in short supply of an English language environment with other children. I also took Yannick to Sing and Sign (baby signing) and later Jo Jingles (structured music intro). We started Sing and Sign when he was eight months old and far from speaking any language. He quickly picked up the most important signs to him, 'eat' and 'drink'. Other signs followed (including 'more' and 'bird') but as they weren't quite so important they took some time. At 18 months Yannick all of sudden had a speaking explosion, within a couple of weeks he knew and used loads of words (see here for my notes at the time). At his second birthday he spoke quite well but not complete sentences yet. This all developed over the twelve months and his German is just great. Of course there are some things that are not quite right yet, but mostly I only notice a wrong form of a verb in past perfect tense or similar. Sometimes he struggled to put all of what he wanted to say into one sentence and they got ridiculously long and warped, but it was just great to hear how much he was interested in communicating his thoughts. So far so good.

At two and a half I started to speak to Yannick in English when we were playing and reading as I wanted to increase his confidence. I knew he understood a lot as he often would comment on a situation in German to me after listening in to other people's and children's conversations. But he was just not speaking. Slowly, slowly he started to speak back to me. At age three he started pre-school, prepared with the most important things to say, and off he went. From the first week I noticed changes in the way he was using English and while he's not quite as fluent as in German, he's definitely confident to speak now. Sometimes we get funny translations and you notice that German is his first language. For example he still says 'I know that not' or 'I want that not' which is literally translated from German word order. But at the same time he comes out with English songs and typical phrases that he heard over and over in his books. When I ask him what a word means in English he can almost always tell me in German. It's just incredible. Soon he'll be like a native speaker!

We had a nice word a while ago, it was a fusion of 'mechanic' and 'Mechaniker'. What we got was 'mexicaniker'. There were more funny words but I can't remember a thing right now. Have to activate my memory one of these days…