Thanks for this, I found this post especially true. One of the things I find extremely amusing about multilingual parenting - so it feels positive to me - is when the kids start using outdated language because the only language bubble they are growing up in are people from another generation (their parents). I've only been following your blog for a few months so I don't know if you've written about this already. The other day, my (German) mom came visiting us in the US and we both started laughing so hard when my 3-year-old daughter defiantly said 'Ich hab aber keinen Bock', which basically means 'but I don't want to', in 1980ies German. I have no idea if people still use this in Germany - I hadn't heard anyone say it in a long time. My mom and I were flabbergasted as to where she would have picked it up, until the next day when my mom looked at me and laughed: 'There! You just said it!' Apparently I've been using 'Bock haben' all the time, completely without realizing, something that probably just came back to me from my own childhood. I'm sure next time we'll go to Germany, it'll be like time-traveling for my daughter as well...
Thanks for this, I found this post especially true. One of the things I find extremely amusing about multilingual parenting - so it feels positive to me - is when the kids start using outdated language because the only language bubble they are growing up in are people from another generation (their parents). I've only been following your blog for a few months so I don't know if you've written about this already. The other day, my (German) mom came visiting us in the US and we both started laughing so hard when my 3-year-old daughter defiantly said 'Ich hab aber keinen Bock', which basically means 'but I don't want to', in 1980ies German. I have no idea if people still use this in Germany - I hadn't heard anyone say it in a long time. My mom and I were flabbergasted as to where she would have picked it up, until the next day when my mom looked at me and laughed: 'There! You just said it!' Apparently I've been using 'Bock haben' all the time, completely without realizing, something that probably just came back to me from my own childhood. I'm sure next time we'll go to Germany, it'll be like time-traveling for my daughter as well...