Leo, his mum and I just got back from a few much-needed, and extremely well-spent vacation days in the French Alps, where we had the pleasure of attending a wonderful family event. Although I could go on about how great Annecy is and what a great time we had,
I think the linguistic progress Leo made in those five days was perhaps even more noteworthy.
His German is now I’d say close to on a par with his monolingual peers – that alone is major feat considering his multilingual setting. His Swedish has improved dramatically in the last six months. It improved the most when he spent two weeks with his Swedish relatives in January. Since then, he speaks approximately 80 percent Swedish with his father, of which the last mentioned is very proud.
His French, however, has always been lagging behind, for obvious reasons: Aside from his mother, he has little French input in his daily life and he has of course seldom the opportunity of acquiring the French word for a concept “off the bat” by means of linguistic proximity/similarity, as is the case in German/Swedish.
I was keen on finding out how much progress he would make in just five days among the francophone part of the family.
And I was amazed at the outcome.
Not only did he soak up tons of new words, but he also managed to literally embrace many of the French customs (cheek kisses and random bedtimes…) and more importantly he started speaking French with his French cousins. It was just a matter of a few words here and there, but he managed to get his message across. Example: Since Leo adores swimming, he quickly learned how to compel his great uncle into opening the pool: “Michel, ouvre la piscine s’il te plaît !”
Leo also made progress I had not forecast. He sort of “sorted his thoughts”. Every now and then I found him saying phrases to himself, sometimes in German, sometimes small phrases in French. This one time we found him by himself in the living room, counting small pebbles in French (from 1 to about 12). And then sometimes, Leo would produce German sentences of a syntactical eloquence greatly surpassing anything we had ever heard before – and this while being immersed with native French speakers.
We no longer need to differentiate between the languages using paraphrases such as “kindergarten language” (German), mother’s language and dad’s language, but can actually say German, French and Swedish.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, Leo then asked me today: “But if German is Kindergarten language, why do you speak German with mum?”
Having spent wonderful days in France, we returned tonight to Berlin. Leo was happy to return home but did not forget to mention that “Pappa, det var en kul resa!” (Dad, that was a fun trip!)
Let’s do it again sometime soon.
P.S. Did he miss his toys? His teddy bears? I can’t say. He went straight for the balcony and set up his late night snack there and then told his mother that for his glass of milk he just needed the coaster with “The princess with the boots and boobies” (German: Die Prinzessin mit den Stiefeln und den Brüsten).
Trilingual issues and joys 