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! :)