The Bilingual Family

After a few false starts with the Graham Greene, I put it aside for a moment to finally read The Bilingual Family: A Handbook for Parents, a wonderful gift that had been on my shelf for a year. Veronika is simply progressing too quickly for me to have ignored it any longer. To quote a mediocre movie, her mind is like a sponge right now and there is not a moment to waste.

For Dinka and me, the decision to try to raise our children bilingually was an easy one for many reasons, the most important of which is that we would like them to be able to talk to their German-speaking cousins, without relying on the lame "English is universal" excuse. Besides, if my dreams of owning a vineyard ever come true, they'll need it. This book did a good job of presenting the research that's been done and providing several case studies of different ways that families have succeeded. This is what I learned from the book: children can adapt easily to many situations and languages but the degree to which the languages are learned and retained depends on the parents, namely in their attitude toward bilingualism and the consistency with which the languages are presented. After reading this and discussing our strategy with Dinka, I am more confident than ever that we can make it work. We have the determination and the right attitude, plus our situation is such that regularly using both languages should be possible. Dinka spends the most time with Veronika so German will be the language she hears most. Her German will also be helped by books, movies and conversing with her family in Austria, on the phone and on long, European-style vacations. Frankly I'm not worried about her English development because it will be everywhere around her but in book terms, it will come from me, my family, her friends and the "outside world."

My main responsibility in all of this is to learn German at a pace that allows me to always understand what is being said at home. If I can't do this on my own, I will employ the aid of a local university to help my progress. At first I considered speaking only German to her and I was doing so for a while without feeling too limited. After reading the book, I realized that for consistency's sake, it's probably better to have one parent speak each language so she associates one with each of us. In the week since I started unleashing my impressive knowledge of English on Veronika, my decision has been confirmed by our improved interaction, which I attribute to 1) my confidence in speaking my first language, and 2) her ever-increasing ability to pick up and incorporate everything that she hears. For instance, she said "cheese" last weekend (On Wisconsin!) and she especially enjoyed and imitated my hiking chant of "Down, down, down...blue trail's going down" (adapted from The Cable Guy scene at Medieval Times), but that's also because I'm such a cool and hilarious father.

So this is our strategy. Dinka teaches her proper German and I am my normal, goofy self in English. There is no way this can go wrong.