Sometimes it’s just all mixed up. I just shared with my five-year-old daughter a photo my dad emailed me, when she asked, “Is Grandpa going to come one time in our house?” I shared that with him and he remarked on the German syntax. He speaks some German too, since we lived in Germany when I was small. It’s funny, I don’t always notice it because I am usually so focused on deriving her meaning, but yes, it is definitely structured like the German. She will also stick a German word into an English sentence and use English grammar, like “Well, my friend bads (bathes) every night.” This is something my German husband is also guilty of, although for him it is usually a joke, and I have to chide him for doing it and making things even more confusing for our daughter.
The other day, I heard my daughter saying to her friend (who is English but goes to Swiss kindergarten in our village with my daughter), “But that knows jeder!” That one really made me smile. In German, jeder means “everyone,” and “That knows everyone” is a perfectly normal sentence construction in German. Frank and I get it but I think it must be confusing to people that only speak one of her languages. A few weeks ago, the girls had been preparing for a school parade where they were dressed as pirates and the English girl’s mother had wondered exactly what they meant when they told her about their shirts with the “dead heads” on them. That’s because the German word for skull, der Totenkopf, translates literally to “dead head.” You have to give these kids credit for figuring out these translations all the time, even if they sometimes come up with a funny one.
Even I have forgotten what is the most natural way to say some things in English since I am not around native speakers much, and almost never around Americans. (I know all of 3 Americans here, but I see only one of them with any regularity.) Even in Dubai, where English is the prominant language, I was often around non-native speakers, so it’s been six years since I’ve lived among native English speakers. I was in a fabric store the other day and I said to the lady across from me, “Wissen Sie–darf ich selber schneiden?” (Do you know, can I cut it myself?) She looked at me for a second and then said, in an American accent, “Yeah, if they’re not around you can just cut it yourself.” How funny to accidentally be speaking to an American in German, and to have been understood and then responded to–in American English. I was really taken aback. I think living where we do now, in a smaller village, I have gotten used to only speaking German when I am out.
But we all do it, mix up the languages. English-speaking expats get together and have conversations in English peppered with German or Swiss German because it’s just easier, and sometimes it makes more sense. It just makes sense to refer to the train station as the Bahnhof, and the kids’ morning snack as ‘znueni because that is what they are. When we relate a conversation we’ve had in German it is also like that. It just doesn’t have the same meaning when you translate everything into English. Verrueckt just works better than “crazy” sometimes. We also have conversations where we sit around trying to remember the English word for something–it’s like a game to see who can find it first. Like a meeting of my book club at a restaurant where we were all trying to come up with the word venison. Non-native speakers are always asking us for the English words for things and sometimes it’s only the German word that will come.
Well, however stupid it makes me feel sometimes when I can’t find an English word or construct an English sentence in a more natural way, I was comforted by this recent New York Times article on the benefits to the brain of bilingualism. It’s like exercise for my Hausfrau brain.
myowngeography 