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