Decisions, Decisions

It was about 4 years ago when my wife and I started talking about how we were going to raise our son with both German and English.  Deciding the best way to do this was a difficult proposition, especially since we didn’t even know what and how many different ways there are to do such a thing.

Our first step, therefore, was research.  We googled, and googled, and googled some more.  Can you believe it?  There isn’t actually that much (or wasn’t anyway) to find about how to raise a bilingual child.  Were we missing something?  Were we making it harder than it needed to be?  You would think as “small” as the world is today, that there would be plenty of resources for this.  But no.  Just my luck!

We did find a few things to help us though.  The most useful was about a family in Austria where the mother spoke English and the father German.  Their method was very simple, but probably quite effective.  She spoke English, and he spoke German.  Wow!  What a revelation!  Really though, she spoke exclusively English with their kids, and he spoke German with them exclusively.  Simply genius.  Apparently we were over thinking it!

So all of the German classes, all of the studying, all of the sticky notes, all of the crossword puzzles, all for nothing!  Not really, but it is ironic that I had spent so much time and effort to learn German and fit in, and now I was going back to speaking mainly english.  But this would also start a whole new phase for us.  Phase 1, English; phase 2, German; phase 3 Denglish!


One thought on “Decisions, Decisions

Tell me what you think

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s