Blogging Carnival On Bilingualism

I have finally taken the leap and joined the blogging carnival on bilingualism, at least in the form of contributing a post. The July carnival is hosted at Non-native bilingualism and the topic this month is (unsurprisingly) non-native bilingualism, which naturally explains why I decided to get involved. From what I can gather raising bilingual (or multilingual) kids can earn you raised eyebrows in the best of families/circles of friends, but never are they arched higher than when it is revealed that you are doing so in a language that is not strictly speaking your mother tongue. It has been a great relief to me to discover that I am not the only one out there who is endeavouring such a feat.

My own contribution discusses what happens to my kids' language when school is out for the summer.

The carnival features new topics each month and is a well of information and inspiration to anyone interested in enriching their children's, and their own, lives with the love and knowledge of more than one language. Check it out! ;)

Summer English

Ben and a friend at end of year excursion to Sverresborg Folk Museum

Ben, Nic and Christi attend English immersion school, where all subjects are taught in English, except for Norwegian (4 hours a week). They are expected to speak English in the classroom, but obviously speak a bit of Norwegian in the playground, though this depends on the make-up of the class. If there are students who don’t speak Norwegian very well, they tend to stick with English in the playground as well. This is very much the case in Nic’s class, as I have observed at birthday parties, where the kids all speak English to each other the entire time. (On a side note this has been a bit of an issue in the past when Nic has wanted to invite both people from his class and other friends from outside of school to his parties, though that is a topic for another post.)

As I pick them up from school in the afternoon we tend to chat in English as well, and then, somewhere along the way in the car from school to our house the conversation usually fades into Norwegian. Now a days that’s usually down to Ben screaming from the back seat “si det på noooorsk!!” (say it in Norwegian). At home no two days are the same, but usually we’ll chat in Norwegian until homework time, when discussion will once again fade back into English.

The point I’m trying to make is this; on any given day my children tend to want to speak more Norwegian than English at home, probably because they need the respite after a day of English only in school. This obviously, in one way takes a bit of pressure off of me as a non native bilingual parent, because even on days when I hardly speak any English I know that they will have had their fill. On the other hand I should be careful to rest on my laurels, for exactly the same reason, because the resources they get in school are not the same as the ones I can provide. In school they will cover subjects and even play, but they won’t experience dinner time conversation, chatting at bed time or even being told to tidy their room or brush their teeth. To become balanced bilinguals they need all of this, both the academic and social vocabulary they get to practice in school AND being nagged by their mum J

So, with this in mind it is always interesting to see what happens when the summer holidays are upon us. My English weary kids will go a week or so, tops, speaking a lot of Norwegian every day, before they tire of that and revert to English. And this is the beauty of it; it is always the kids who initiate it.  This is true for Nicholas and Christie, but I have not yet noticed Ben do this as much. Last summer  I finally went all in with the bilingual parenting idea, hoping I could help Ben stay with the programme over the  holidays. And he was so motivated and did so well. This summer, though, he seems less motivated, while at the same time having achieved a much higher level of proficiency. I have no doubt now that should he forget anything over the summer it will all come flooding back to him in August. Still, there is that ‘balanced bilingual’ idea, and having the older kids being so ready to keep it English will help both me and Ben to stay on track.

Once again a bit of a rambling post but I hope I got my points across J

Jinxed

A few weeks back I wrote a post describing how well Ben was doing with his languages, and now, not long after, he has taken to speaking to me almost exclusively in Norwegian. :-/ I have read tons of posts and articles by other parents discussing what to do with children who didn’t want to speak in the minority language and counted myself lucky that this has never been a real problem for us. Today alone I have taken myself in asking Ben three times to please reply in English. The first two times I asked it as a favour, the third time I ordered him to. Now, I know this won’t be the way to go but I got desperate.  My plan B was always to just ignore it if the kids spoke Norwegian and keep talking to them in English and eventually they would go back to speaking to me in English again. This may still be my best bet but I’m just scared all of a sudden that all my efforts are going to waste.

On the other hand, Christi does talk a lot of English, so maybe a period of resistance doesn’t spell the end of our bilingual adventure. After all, Ben will continue English schooling for the next 10 years, and he may just be tired now and wants communication to be less hard work. English is not his native language and Norwegian does come easier.

I just don’t know quite how to handle it…

Also, this comes at the same time as I have decided to make more of an effort with the 180 challenge over at multilingualliving.com. The Spanish studies have gone fairly well for me personally but I’ve lost the kids by being too unstructured.  Yesterday I vowed to get the children more involved and try some of the 10 minutes a day ideas, but with Ben seemingly exhausted by juggling two languages insisting on a third would surely be foolish. Perhaps I’ll involve Christi and Nic to begin with and leave Ben out for a bit. Or just put on a Pocoyo video and he can watch if he wants to…

As for the older kids and Spanish they are doing well despite us not focusing on studying it together. Christi just wrote a catchy song about looking for her shorts, and she keeps singing it around the house. “Donde están mis pantalónes cortos? Están aquí? No! Están allí? No!”  J And Nic is showing an affinity with languages, and new vocabulary in particular. The other day I told him “Tienes que hacer los deberes ahora!”, to which he replied “Huh??” Me: “You have to do your homework now!”  A few minutes later as he sat down with his work he asked me whether “ahora” meant “now”. I said yes, and asked him how he knew. He said that “ahora” was the last word of the Spanish sentence and when I translated it the last word of the English one was “now”.   J

Greetings from the wayside

Aye, it is true, I have fallen off the wagon again...kinda.

Of course there is still bilingualism going on but the Spanish has taken a bit of a knock in our busy daily life. I'm still reading my Spanish novels for learners (I'm on my final Lola Lago story and I love them! I wish there were more) I have not been speaking enough lately and especially so with the kids. Though Ben did come home from school boasting about how he and Sebastian (from Columbia) had been talking Spanish together. I was a bit puzzled as Ben doesn't really know enough Spanish to talk to anyone, so I asked him what he had been saying. "Stupido!", he said with a cheeky grin. I didn't want to rain on his parade so I just told him he might do better choosing words that didn't resemble English and obviously also that it wasn't very nice calling people stupido. I guess I'll have to teach him some friendlier phrases. NOT that it was me who taught him stupido! I blame Sebastian.

As for English I've been lazy at home. I speak more Norwegian and less English these days, or have done so up until recently. It may have something to do with the fact that we've been travelling a lot lately, visiting family, and for some reason it can still feel a bit awkward to be using English with the kids. But now I will have to get better at it because we just had the news that Ben was offered a place in Y2 at Birralee International, and that he qualified as "a child of Norwegian [or foreign] origin with English as a first language". To be honest I cannot quite remember what I put in the application, though I do seem to recall that I really stressed how comfortable he was with English and that we speak it a lot at home. So I better turn my white lie into a reality before we get busted. LOL. Nah, en serio, we do speak a lot of English at home I just need to be more consistent! :)

Ben becomes bilingual

My decision to learn Spanish and teach my kids some along the way had sort of made me think less about the way we use English in our family. Like I’ve said in earlier posts I’m the one who uses it most with the kids, though by no means one hundred percent of the time. I think my earlier “guesstimate” was 40/60 English/Norwegian. However, I have been more conscious about using English ever since last summer so the usage may well be closer to 80 percent some days.

A few days ago my husband commented on how Ben now switches between Norwegian and English depending on whom he’s addressing. Ben was outside helping his dad clear the snow from our drive and they were chattering away in Norwegian. When Ben was ready to go inside, the moment he opened the front door and called for me he switched to English, calling “Mum?!” I thought it was funny when he mentioned it, and didn’t think much more of it.

Then, two days ago we had a parent-teacher conference with Ben’s teacher and she told us that he is getting on fabulously with English, and even better he uses it when he plays as well now. Most of the Norwegian native-speakers will use English in the classroom and Norwegian for play. For me this shows that he is finding it natural to use English and isn’t doing it to please me or the teachers, but that he himself, probably subconsciously, chooses to use it.

So, yesterday I was in the sofa chatting with him, in English, and he asked me something I couldn’t answer so I said; “Why don’t you ask Dad?” He said “ok”, and turned around calling “Pappa!!”, and then proceeded to ask the question in Norwegian.

This makes me even more motivated to keep talking English to the children, though the other two will rarely instigate an English conversation even if they will answer me back in English if I start. On the other hand, the success with Ben makes me feel more uneasy about the Spanish project. I’m nervous about rocking the boat and have a feeling that I may be asking too much.

Language Challenge 180

I’m quite excited about the Language Challenge 180, which is a challenge over 180 days, to either get serious about the language(s) you are learning or refreshing and building on the second language skills you already have. I suppose I could have focused on English for this, but as we have so much English around us anyway it made more sense to work on our Spanish. This challenge is set up by www.multilingualliving.com and there are some 650 families/people participating in it. It is great to have someone send you e-mails twice a week to ask how you’re doing and give you that little nudge that can be, and often is, much needed. In addition we now have the opportunity to share experiences and resources with other learners, and also native speakers, which is great!

For us this first week has been less organized than I would have liked, simply because I haven’t had the time to fill in the forms that we got, which are meant to help us get a clear view of our targets and resources, but never the less, it has been a good week for Spanish for most of us. Ben let me read to him from the bilingual story books (“Ricitos de oro y los tres osos” and “El gato con botas”) and even wanted to play “Done está?”, which is a vocabulary building game we play using “My first 1000 words in Spanish”. And for Christi I managed to find two different Spanish teen magazines, both with One Direction on the front of their March issues, but unfortunately I don’t how to get hold of them. :P I need a Spanish connection, i.e. someone who can physically go to a kiosk and get the mags and send them to me.




As for my own learning this week hasn’t been great. I’m very busy reading for my half term tests in pedagogy and didactics, but as soon as they’re done it’s all Spanish all the time, because on Monday 19th I have a compulsory oral test in Spanish for my university course. If I don’t pass that one I won’t be able to sit the exam in May.

The monolingual family problem

In our own little pleasant bubble at home being bilingual, and learning a third language, isn’t a problem. Within the family we have reached an agreement without really ever discussing it, that speaking Norwegian and English works for us. We don’t have a strict OPOL deal, seeing as none of us are native speakers, although I speak a lot of English with the kids and DH speaks mainly Norwegian but will also speak some English when it feels natural. In fact whenever someone speaks English around him he tends to just flip over without thinking about it. In our world there is nothing wrong with that. In fact it is normal. If no-one ever spoke a different language it would seem strange.

In addition to our two main languages there is now also Spanish. We are still at a stage where it is more of a hobby. We are learning together. I will admit that the whole thing was my idea, and still it is I who is the most motivated and who is racing ahead. Still, I meant to share this with the children in particular, and I didn’t even (wrong as it may be) ask my husband what he thought of it. He just came home from work to a house full of Spanish labels and a wife who would ask his children what they wanted for breakfast in Spanish. He didn’t make a fuss. Maybe he thought it would blow over. Maybe he was genuinely interested to see where this would take us. He did make it clear, however, that he had no intention of learning Spanish. I said fine. A month later I asked him a few questions:

Me: How do you say kitchen in Spanish?
Him: Cocina
Me: And living room?
Him: Sala. (pause) Taza is toilet because I’m always staring at that label. Is lavabo soap or sink?
Me: Sink… Soap is jabón.
Him: Oh, I see. It’s just the label was next to the soap and I thought the drawing on it was a soap dispenser.

So much for not learning Spanish! And apparently I teach Spanish (even subliminally) better than I draw. The point is that at our house it’s normal to play around with languages, learning new ones and using them. The problems lie with the extended family.

My family might think I’m slightly weird for raising the children bilingually, but they are very supportive of the idea of sending them to English immersion school. - Now as for the other side... not so much. But there is a good reason for this. My husband’s parents do not speak English, while mine do. They can read a few words but they are not able to read a longer text or follow a conversation, let alone be part of one. We were visiting them over the half term break and I/we got told off for speaking English. It was not so much a “would you please refrain from speaking a language I don’t understand” as an accusation that we no longer knew how to talk Norwegian.

I kind of understand how it could come across a bit rude to speak in a language my MIL didn’t understand but at the same time this conversation, between me and Christi, took place in a different room when she just happened to walk in. I wouldn’t sit down in front of them and chatter away in English, although if the kids ask me a question in English I will usually answer back in English before switching to Norwegian. To me this is just how we speak in our family, but to them it is akin to an insult, something we do deliberately to keep them in the dark. I don’t quite know what to do about this now. I would like to just keep doing it like we do it at home, but curtailing it a bit during meal times when we are all together. Or we could simply speak Norwegian for the whole time while we are here. It’s not like the kids will forget English within 4 days. I’m sure that would be the best thing to do, but I would like them to know that our desire to have our kids grow up as bilinguals doesn’t grow out of a wish to be better than others, which is what it seems to imply to them.

Exposing my kids

I recently made a new acquaintance in the multilingual sphere, a Finnish mother of bilingual children (French/Finnish) and educated in the field of multilingualism to boot. She is currently collecting the experiences of parents raising bi-/multi-lingual children in order to construct what I am sure will be a very warmly welcomed guide for parents in the same situation, or people considering following the same route. I received the survey the other day and question 2 had me stumped:

“What languages are the children exposed to in the home?”

At first I thought this was quite straight forward, Norwegian and English. Then I decided that I might put down Spanish as well, seeing as I am actively trying to influence the children to learn, even though I don’t have any goal of making them fluent. But then I started thinking and it dawned on me that if I were to answer truthfully, naming all the languages that my children would be exposed to at home during, let’s say a normal week, the list would not end with Spanish. The top three languages are merely the ones they will hear their parents use. Watching TV they will likely be exposed to several European languages.

The most commonly heard languages (in addition to English and Norwegian) would be Swedish, Danish, German and French, and of course Sami. While the children will hear enough French and German from TV and films by the time they’re 7 or 8 to easily recognize the languages, they will not be able to understand much without studying them actively. They know the odd word in German or French, but that’s simply a result of having a language loving geek for a mother, who will not stop going on about the relationship between languages and the etymology of words.



As for the other Scandinavian languages there’s a different story. Ever since I can remember I have been able to understand spoken Swedish and Danish quite well, and reading them poses no problem what so ever. I actually believed that all Norwegians would have the same degree of understanding without even practicing the languages simply because the Scandinavian tongues are so similar both in grammar and vocabulary. When I had my children I was shocked to discover that young Norwegian kids, at least mine, didn’t understand Swedish. Norwegian television has always aired a lot of Swedish children’s shows, particularly films and series based on the works of Astrid Lindgren. When my daughter watched these shows she paid attention but when I asked her whether she could understand what they said she answered that she only recognized a few words. As she grew older her ability increased, and now at 12 she has no problems understanding all but a few words of Swedish. Danish is harder, but probably mostly due to the fact that there aren’t as many Danish programmes as there are Swedish ones. Most people I know find reading Danish easier than reading Swedish, because the written languages of Denmark is closer to standard Norwegian (bokmål), but they understand spoken Swedish better than spoken Danish.

So, how to class these languages? In Norway you wouldn’t put Swedish your CV, as it feels akin to cheating, the language is almost like a dialect of my own language and I would count knowing a dialect as knowledge of a separate language. On the other hand I had to learn to understand this language. It isn’t my mother tongue. I understand it, I can read it, but I would never speak it because I don’t have to. If I encounter a Swede I would speak to him (slowly) in my own language. At the most I would throw a few Swedish words in if he had trouble understanding the Norwegian ones. (In Norway we even have a word for it; Svorsk (Sworwegian))

I still don’t know where I’m going with this, but it is clear to me that while Norwegian is the majority language, and English is the chosen minority/school/home language, my children are exposed to a number of languages at home, and I for one am really happy that we live in a place where that is the norm! :)

The truth about el sombrero...

Sometimes learning a new language can take the mystery out of it completely. I finally managed to print out some worksheets for the kids' Spanish lessons tonight. Nicholas got one on 'la ropa' where the object was to connect the pictures of pieces pof clothing to the correct words for them. While drawing a neat line from the word 'el sombrero' to the picture of a Mexican style hat he sighed and uttered:

"Sombrero! Det e så skuffende! Det pleid å høres så kult ut, og nå e det bare en hatt..." (Sombrero! It's so disappointing! It used to sound so cool, and now it's just a hat..."

What is a first language?

I gave just applied for a school place for Ben, who will be starting Y2 this autumn. On the form I had to inform the school what his first language is. On the list of criteria for acceptance “English as a first language” is right at the top. Now, the people at the school already know my son, as he is currently a pupil in Y1, and last year he was in Reception Class. In Norway children start school when they’re 6, and so the first two years are counted as nursery school, which is why we have to apply again. In year 1 there are approx. 40 children, and only 20 will go on to Y2. The more I can do to raise our chances, the better. We are already favoured, in theory, because Ben has siblings in school. Christi will start Y9 next autumn, and Nic will start Y6. Still, I’m not sure how many of the children now in Y1 count English as their first language… To cut a long story short, I ended up writing that Ben’s first language (at least chronologically) is Norwegian, but informed them that I speak English with him at home and that he is comfortable with the language.

It’s the mention of the level of comfort, something I just happened to add on, perhaps to let them know I’m not making him speak English against his will, which made me ponder the question in the title of my post. I’m currently sat trying to write an assignment for my history class. It has to be in Norwegian, or at least I suppose they expect it to be in Norwegian. My problem now is that I am nowhere near as comfortable writing in Norwegian as I am writing in English, especially not when it comes to the subject of history or education. This has a very reasonable explanation. Almost from the day I started studying history (and English) my working language has been partly English, and this part grew by the year. The textbooks, with few exceptions, were in English, which meant that my growing subject vocabulary invariably ended up being mainly English. When I started to write my Master’s thesis I struggled for months to get anything done. Working in Norwegian was awkward. I could never find the words I needed. Only when I decided to write the thesis in English did I manage to make some headway and put my thoughts, findings and analyses down on paper. It makes me think that while Norwegian is certainly my first spoken language, English is now my first written language. Of course we all know that with languages the rule is “use it or lose it”!

I’m not sure where I’m going with this. It just made me think. Something I do in English while writing, and to a large extent also while just thinking, because I like to think in words, if you know what I mean. When people talk to me I often see the words in my head, typed out, so to speak. This even happens when I listen to Spanish, even though I don’t know the spelling. My brain guesses at the spelling, and with a phonetic language like Spanish my brain is often right :-)

Code switch of the day:

“I dag ska æ stå opp og lag breakfast på sænga te æ!” ~Ben (waking up on Mother’s Day… He also used the word ”te-spoon”. LOL )

Spanish victory of the week:

Christiania coming into my room to tell me that she can understand a bit of Spanish tweets. Which words? No entiendo, café and tostada :-) - She also asked me how to say “you are” and practiced saying “tu eres mi madre/padre”.
– Kind of a big victory this week, as she not only understood words but came asking to learn more!

(As for my Spanish, it’s not been as good. I read the chapters in my book for Friday’s lecture, but then missed the lecture as I had to work, and I also had to cancel to Skype chats with Ana due to work and school :P )

Mi primera clase de español

So, today I had my first proper Spanish lesson at the university. For the next 11 weeks I will have four hours of Spanish every Friday. - Two lessons in the morning, in lecture form, where the focus will be on grammar, as far as I can gather. Then I have a two hour break, because there was no room in the study group session straight after the lecture, which means I’m back in the classroom again from noon til 2.

The group session focuses more on vocabulary work and talking. There were only about 15 of us present today. In groups of 4 we answered questions about a book called La chica del tren, which we had to read the first four chapters of for today’s lesson. A few of the students hadn’t read it. Luckily I managed to get hold of it yesterday.



Neither the lecture nor the group lesson were particularly difficult, but I would have struggled if I hadn’t know any Spanish in advance, I think. I noticed that I have quite an extensive vocabulary compared to the others in my group. (Thank you, MosaLingua flash cards!)

When we had finished talking about the book, we moved on to a written assignment we were supposed to have prepared. We were meant to share this brief text about ourselves with each other. I think I did quite well, and according to la profesora I hadn’t made any mistakes either. ;-) The others in my group had interesting, well written texts too. Then, when we had gone through our presentations we talked a bit about what we did in our spare time. None of us were fluent enough in Spanish to speak correctly all of the time, and we frequently had to guess at words or use Norwegian or English ones, but it was great fun simply trying to keep a conversation going in Spanish about dancing, playing football, doing magic and playing the ukulele.

I’m very much looking forward to next Friday!

Taking Spanish to another level!

I have mentioned several times how my Spanish studies have all along been of a very independent nature. I’ve been taking advantage of the mass of free resources online, I’ve downloaded apps to my phone and I’ve bought books. The most organised thing I have done so far is probably the Skype dates and the written correspondation with Ana.

I wanted to join a course before but it is incredibly expensive, around 2-3000 NOK for ten evenings of 1-2 hour lessons. Back in September I checked to see if the university might offer language courses (they always used to in the past). As it turned out they did but during the Autumn term they didn’t offer Spanish. I did mean to call back and hear what they would do for Spring term, but I completely forgot…until yesterday. I found out that a)there is a Spanish, beginner level, course! B) it started two weeks ago but they let me join late, and c) tomorrow morning at 8:15 I have my first proper Spanish lesson. :-) I can’t wait!

I bought the textbooks today and have been preparing as best I could for the lesson. Ahora necesito ir a la cama, tengo que levantarme temprano! :)

Toma una foto de...

...un carro

Like I said in my previous post, it has been a pretty good day for languages.

After tricking Ben into reading and writing English, with great success, I still had to come up with a plan to keep him from whining about how incredibly bored he was. (He had gone to see a friend down the street after he finished his writing, but his friend was out and so he came back and hung around us even grumpier than before...)

Dad gave him the camera and told him to go up to his room and take some pictures of his toys. He came back after half a minute with one photo of a teddy bear and two of a Beyblade stadium. And now I suddenly got the idea that I could use this game to practice Spanish words. I asked if he wanted to play and he agreed. 'Ok', I said,'go and take a picture of something...verde!' Ok, said he, and disappeared upstairs. A minute later he was back with a picture of a green part from a toy.



'Brilliant!', I said. After that I made him take pictures of something rojo, azul, amarillo, blanco, naranja, negro, marrón, gris and rosa, and he managed all of them on his own except marrón, when he needed a hint.
When we ran out of colours I made him take photos of a few things; leche, agua, lámpara,cama,carro,chaqueta and zapatos, which are words I knew he would know, plus a few new ones; hermano, hermana and papá.



Nic was paying close attention to all this and when Ben was done playing and had left the room he looked at me knowingly and said 'hey, you just made him practice Spanish and he doesn't even know. He just thinks it's a game!' ...'Can't you turn my homework into a game too, mum?' :) I told him I would another time.

Ben and Floppy

It's been a good day for languages at our house today. English first, and then Spanish (which I will have to come back to in the next post).

It got off to a very slow start though, with Ben refusing to read his 'Biff and Chip' book for school tomorrow. They use the Oxford Reading Tree literacy programme at their school and he is currently on stage 1+, or purple books as we like to call them. He'd already completed the green ones and the grey ones when all of a sudden he lost all interest in reading. :S His teacher wanted him to stop taking reading books home for the next 3-4 weeks, to give him a break, but I feel it's better if he takes at least one bok home each week so he doesn't forget what he already knows. I also hope that I will be able to trick, threaten and bribe him into reading a tiny bit. Better a page here and a sentence there than nothing at all, I think.

So, today I started out very optimistically by asking him if he would read to me. He made a face and told me 'No!'. I begged. He still refused. I offered him cake. He refused. I told him there would be no more video games or computers or tv until he read those 8 pages. He refused. I asked him why he didn't want to read. He said he hated reading because it was 'SO boring'. 'Is it boring because it takes such a long time to figure out what the words mean?', I asked. 'Yes.' Then I told him that the more he reads the easier it will become. He didn't seem convinced.



After breakfast I didn't really have time to bother with Ben's reading as I had my own reading to do, preparing for a pedagogy seminar (I'm working on my teaching qualification) tomorrow. Ole (aka Dad) sat down with Nic to help him with the rest of his homework. Ben ran around the living room bugging us, whining about being bored when I had an idea. I took him into the kitchen and found some of the fridge poetry words. We have some ready made ones, and a few I made myself with vocabulary from the ORT books on to help Ben recognise the most common words. I picked out some of the names and words he should know and made him try to read a simple sentence. I am Floppy. I could never find enough words to make a proper story so I ended up making a story about Floppy going to the park, having Ben read the odd word in between that I was able to find on the fridge. He really enjoyed that and made me repeat the story twice, helping me read the words.

I figured I might be able to take this one step further and took five of the word magnets back to the dining table where the others sat with Nic's school work. I wrote the story on a sheet of paper, except for the words on the magnets and put them in the appropriate places. Then we read the story together. Afterwards I asked him if he would like to write the words from the magnet on the paper, completing the sentences. He was very happy to try that, and did so in no time, working very diligently. Finally we read the story again and we were all very proud of his efforts, but none more than the author himself. And just like that Ben had spent the morning reading and writing!

Back to school II

Today it was finally time to move back to the good, old, new school :) Like I mentioned earlier the parents were not allowed in in the morning. We were forced to stand outside in the rain and listen to an inaudible speech for 15 minutes before the kids entered the buidling though. I won't whine to much about that. After all it was for the kids, and they were all really excited :D

At 2 p.m. we arrived at the school and wow, it was so different, and yet the halls, and most of the rooms were still the same, though they had changed colour from shades of green and off white, to various shades of light grey. The doors to the classrooms all had large windows in them now, and some of the classrooms had additional windows facing the halls as well, which lent a very airy and open feel to the place. The lighting was a bit bright though, and the lack of posters on the walls made it feel a wee bit like a hospital, or an insane asylum (not too far from reality... LOL).

Ben and Nic are both on the first floor and Christi is on the second. On the third floor there's the music room, the D&T/Art room and the new library, which is absolutely fabulous!



Ben's classroom is the traditional Y1t room , and it feels the same, though the ceiling is now considerably higher. They have also bought a whole bunch of new toys and a new computer too :)




The inside was very impressive, but the playground is not done yet, and it is a giant step down from the wide open spaces at Brøset. You win some, you lose some. Luckily there's a park across the street from the school so there should be lots of opportunity for playing anyway.

Spanish
No sign of the flash cards yet :P But a few small victories again to make up for that: Ben came home from school telling me that Simon (his best mate) had called him señorita (LOL) and also said 'that word that means good in Spanish'! I was very amused that though he couldn't remember the word he had understood it. I said 'oh, you mean bien?', and he said 'no, muybien' :) - Then later, when I went to tickle him he yelled 'no tocas!', which I'm also going to count as progress. :)

As for my own studies, I had another Skype date with Ana. We were going to discuss travelling but as I still found it very hard to say anything in the past tense she suggested we'd rather talk about a topic in the present. So we ended up telling each other about a typical day. She did better than me! I needed quite a lot of help, but on the bright side I learnt a lot tonight. :)Like how to say "llevo los niños en coche a la escuela" and new words like "deberes" and "sobrina" :) Iremos hablar otra vez jueves, sobre nuestros hobbies. Puedo aprender como hablar sobre el (la?) ukulele. :)

Mi español

This post is really not about the kids but rather about me,
and my attempts at learning Spanish. The flash cards still haven’t arrived and the second set I made for the kids sparked little if any enthusiasm. Quite frankly I worry that they’ve stopped caring. Did I push them too much? I hope not. I guess I just need to find some middle ground between my own obsession-like interest in learning and the kids’ nonchalant attitude to the idea.

Nevertheless I keep going with my own studies. Earlier I have mentioned using electronic flash cards, MosaLingua, on my iPhone. They have been, and continue to be invaluable in my language adventure, but if I have any hope of becoming fluent I need to immerse myself as much as is possible in my situation. Since August I have been a registered member of a language social network site called ‘The Mixxer’ (www.language-exchange.com) . The whole point of this site is to provide language learners with partners, in many cases native speakers if the language you’re studying, which you may write with, or even better talk to using Skype.

My first contact on the mixer was Ana from Spain. She used to live in Norway a few years back and was interested in learning Norwegian properly. (Believe it or not she never learnt Norwegian while living here because she was a student in an international environment and thus could get by using English. A very common story for many international students in Norway…)

From August on Ana and I would write short messages to each other, I in Spanish and she in Norwegian. We would correct each other’s messages before replying. I believe these messages has helped a lot in developing my Spanish in that I had to use what I had learnt, and not least that I had to expand both my vocabulary and my knowledge of grammar in order to communicate.

We had talked ever since late Summer about Skyping but we kept putting it off because other things got in the way, and also because we were both slightly trepidatious about actually talking. On Thursday we spoke for the first time, and I won’t lie, it was awkward and hard, but I’m sure it will do wonders for the progress of both our languages. What was the hardest for me was to remember simple words and also conjugations. These last few weeks I have finally started to be able to talk about things in the past and the future but the second I wanted to say something about stuff in the past I couldn’t remember a thing. It wasn’t just me though. She struggled too. I don’t want to sound mean, but I like that we seem to be on the same level language-wise.

This first time we only talked about how weird talking was, and how embarrassed we both were that we couldn’t remember things. We also agreed to talk again on Monday and we agreed on a topic. I suggested travel or holidays. I suppose I should be studying vocabulary relating to travel now. I don’t even know what the different countries are called in Spanish :P

Right now I’m making an effort to get more familiar with hearing Spanish by listening to the wonderful podcasts ‘News in slow Spanish’. I can actually understand a bit, and I try as hard as I can to not translate in my head but rather just understand. I don’t know if that makes any sense at all.

Back To School :)

The children all attend an international, English immersion school, normally located in the centre of town in a purpose built school building from the late 19th century. For the past year this building has been closed for refurbishment and the kids, and me, have had to trek across town to an interim school. Made up of barracks the school has been remarkably comfortable, though it lacks a gym and a room big enough for assemblies. In addition the drive is quite long, not to mention expensive.

However, this week, after 14 months of exile, they’re finally moving back!! Tomorrow will be the final day in the barracks and on Monday there’s a grand opening of the “new” school! I can’t wait to see what they’ve done to it.

To be continued...

The spelling test

I don't know whether giving my kids a spelling test on Spanish words is a good idea or not, but following my new plan to take into consideration how my kids say that they want to study that is exactly what I've done. As I mentioned in the previous post I made them a few flash cards the other day, and after having played with them for a couple of days both Christiania and Nicholas got a full score on their tests :-)

I will definitely make more flash cards, but I think I might try and plan better for the next batch. The thing I did after the flash cards was putting tags up all over the house naming different things. When we lived in England i 2005/2006 we let our house to an American family. When they moved out and we moved back in there were still Norwegian tags hanging all over the place :-) They had the Norwegian word on them and then under, in brackets, the pronunciation written phonetically in English. I don't feel the need to have a pronunciation guide on my Spanish tags because it's quite straight forward, and Norwegians only pronounce a few sounds different anyway, mainly 'o' and 'u', and once you've learnt that you're good to go.




The main challenge when making the tags are knowing which words are common in Spain and which are typical for Latin America. When I started out I was using the Pimsleur course, which to my knowledge was based on Mexican Spanish. I was fine with that because I'm not a huge fan of the Iberian lisp on the 'z' and some 'c's, but the more I read about Spanish the more I've come to appreciate that while there are few differences in general it might make more sense to try and learn the Iberian version as much as possible, as we live in Europe and will most likely only be able to practice what we've learnt visiting Spain. I don't think I've done too much damage so far. We do say 'jugo' instead of 'zumo' and 'banana' instead of 'plátano', though I have informed the kids that there are some differences, and we can always practice the Iberian words a little before going down there :) Now, back to the tags, I'll try not to keep ignoring Iberian Spanish when learning new words so I'm spending quite a lot of time trying to get the names of things right. Like 'living room'... Is it 'salón'? Sala de estar? Or simply 'sala'? And what is a bedroom? Habitación, dormitorio, quarto? For now I've gone with 'sala' and 'habitación' and I'm consoling myself with the fact that which ever word I choose the chances are we will be understood.

Flash cards

I mentioned earlier today that Nic had expressed a wish to have some proper flash cards made. I perused amazon and found a set of basic flash cards for kids to the laughable price of £0.22! Though to be fair they actually charged seven quid to send them over here... It was still a pretty good deal!


I of course do not possess the patience to wait for those to arrive to test the idea of using flash cards with Nic so I set to making some of my own this evening. My total lack of planning skills made it harder than expected to come up with sensible words to start with. I was going to go with some food vocab seeing as we have been meaning to get into the Spanish breakfast thing again but the ones we would get the most use out of are the same ones the kids already know. In the end the selection of words turned out slightly random but nevertheless all the children seemed thrilled by them. :)



I made 18 cards with nouns on them and the a few bigger ones with useful phrases. At first I tried using all of the small ones but they were too many for Nic to remember, so I selected 7 that were more or less related (mesa, silla, plato, vaso, queso, cama, libro), and we played with those for a bit. And then we added three of the phrases; 'tengo hambre','tengo sed' and 'estoy cansado'. We did this at bedtime and Nic was sure that latter one was made to trick him into actually being sleepy. LOL. Christiania came in and wanted to flip through them as well, and then I assured them that the promised spelling test would be given tomorrow. (What precious geeks they are!)

Ben doesn't read very well yet, and with no pictures the home made cards were not for him. Instead we played with the new Flip Cards App on my phone. With this app I can make my own sets of flash cards with pictures and/or text. I had made a set with the colours. He still remembered azul, rojo, naranja, blanco and verde, which impressed me no end, and he picked up rosa (same in Norwegian), gris (meaning 'pig' in Norwegian) and negro fairly quickly, but struggles a bit to remember púrpura, marrón and amarillo. I'm chuffed to fluffy fairy feathers that he can remember this much! He's a genius, surely :-)

A stroke of genius... or rather an obvious thought to some.

So, yesterday it suddenly dawned on me that in my pursuit of making my kids more interested in learning Spanish I might actually ask them how they would prefer to learn! What a novel idea, right? I can't believe I haven't thought of it before :-P

It turns out Christi would prefer spelling tests (!) and even more shockingly Nicholas liked that idea too. I guess their school does a good job of brainwashing them, because they have weekly spelling tests in school from Y2 and up. I was sceptical at first but after considering it for a bit it's not that different to flash cards, which work a treat for me. Nic said he'd also like real life flash cards that you can actually hold in your hand! LOL. He's so young that he believes the electronic ones on the phone came first. I will make some, and maybe in pairs so we can turn it into a memory game as well :-)

Our Spanish breakfasts are not off to a flying start... This was day two and I forgot both yesterday and today...



On the plus side we watched some Spanish Pocoyo yesterday. My kids, with the possible exception of Ben, are a bit old for Pocoyo but the simple language makes it very useful anyway and I quite like it myself. I was really pleased with myself when Pocoyo ran out of water and I commented "No hay agua" and the narrator said the same thing two seconds later :-D Small victory! And I know Ben was listening intently because he thought Lula was the word for dog. It is in fact the name of the dog but I was happy that he was actively trying to learn. And then we had the opportunity to practice the word 'perro' :)

Code switching robots

The boys were playing downstairs on New Year's Eve, waiting for midnight. Every once in a while they would pop upstairs to let me know what they were doing.

Nic: Vi va robota i fræmtida åsså kom det en komet mot jorda, men vi kun lag et force shield for å protecte oss så kometene bare bounca off. Men ætterpå va vi så sliten at vi hibernata i fire år.

(We were robots in the future and then there was a comet coming towards earth, but we were able to create a force shield so the comet just bonced off. But afterwards we were so tired that we hibernated for four years.)

My comment to this was simply "I'm glad you speak Norwegian so well." Tongue in cheek obviously ;-) To be honest I am impressed at how easily he fits the English words into the Norwegian grammar structure! The English verbs have all been conjugated according to Norwegian grammar. :-)

I forgot to ask the boys which language they were playing in but I guess it was English since retelling it in Norwegian proved such a struggle. LOL