Amaia fyldte to år i dag.

Vi fejrede hende på sædvanlig manér med fælles morgenmad for os alle syv, fødselsdagslagkage om eftermiddagen, og aftensmad bestående af suppe, pizza og is.

Det er altså lidt underligt, når ens yngste fylder år. Mine to døtre er nu to og fire, og selvom jeg husker deres fødsler, som var det i går, så er de jo altså ikke små spædbørn længere, og om blot elve år er de begge teenagere!

Men sådan er det vel. Når man selv er barn, snegler tiden sig afsted, og blot de fireogtyve dage op til jul virker som en evighed. Når man så er voksen, føles det som om, ens børn har fødselsdag en gang om måneden, og de bliver store meget hurtigere, end man kan følge med.

Men stort tillykke til min store lille Amaia!

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Amaia har nu i nogle måneder haft et ret udtryksfuldt sprog. Det er tydeligt baseret på engelsk (i meget højere grad end Annas), selvom hun naturligvis forstår dansk aldeles fremragende).

Her er hendes mest almindelige ord:

Typiske sætninger er fx Beibi weˈaːu? “Hvor er min dukke?” og Nai tai! “Læg dig i min seng!”

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Anna (der fylder 4 den 19.) sagde i dag spontant “I drook it all”.

Jeg er ikke helt sikker på, hvordan hun dannede “drook”. Hvis det blot er påvirkning fra dansk “drak”, skulle hun vel have sagt “I drack it all”, men hun ser ud til at rodet bøjningen af take/took ind i det.

Tosprogede børn er sjove!

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I joined the Danish-Scottish Society shortly after moving to Scotland, but I was not a very active member due to the fact that almost all events took place in Edinburgh (which seems to have a much bigger Danish community than Glasgow). For a couple of years, some people tried to arrange events in Glasgow, but they didn’t typically attract more than ten participants, so eventually I let my membership lapse.

However, these days I’m living with three bilingual children who really could use an opportunity to hear other people speak Danish and learn more about Danish culture, so we recently joined again as a family.

The first event we went to was their Christmas party (in Edinburgh). It was really good fun for the kids. There were at least a hundred people there, including lots of kids, and they were selling glögg, æbleskiver and pebernødder. Towards the end, we all danced around the Christmas tree, singing Danish and English Christmas songs, and afterwards somebody read the kids a Christmas story, and then Santa arrived, bringing presents for all the children.

We then had to leave, but on our way out, each kid got a large bag of sweet, so they were well chuffed!

It’s just a shame it takes an hour and a half to get to Edinburgh – the kids really thought it was a long trip, If only there were enough people in the Glasgow area to arrange similar events for Danish-Scottish families here…

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Marcel started Spanish this year (S3, i.e., the third out of the six high-school years), and he asked me to give him a few extra lessons, given that I speak Spanish and he isn’t too impressed with what he’s learnt at school so far.

His class don’t seem to be using a course book – they’re just using photocopies and the like – so I couldn’t just ask him what he’d learnt already. (As a parent, it would really be much easier if kids were given one book in every subject! Not only is it much harder to help them with homework if you don’t know what they’ve learnt, but it also makes it impossible for them to catch up if they’re off sick, and revision becomes dependent on good note taking in a way it didn’t use to be.)

I therefore decided to ask him some really easy questions, and I started by asking him to tell me the present indicative of the verb ser “to be”. I had expected him to quickly say “soy, eres, es, somos, sois, son”, after which I would have proceeded to some harder verbs or tenses.

However, he really didn’t know the answer. It wasn’t a problem with the terminology – I tried to ask him how he’d say “I am”, etc., but he didn’t know the answer. He claimed the teacher had shown them the forms once, but that he hadn’t had the time to copy them into his jotter.

I asked him what they were doing instead, and he said they were just learning words.

If it’s true, it’s absolutely ludicrous! Language learning is primarily about learning structure – the words are easy to add on later.

However, this episode suddenly made me understand an article I read six months ago and that I had dismissed at the time. It was an article in the Guardian about learning Mandarin in two days (hat-tip: Sabine Citron), and I thought it was just telling me things I knew already. The advice in that article is absolutely right for language teaching in Scottish schools, though: ‘The narrow set of nouns and verbs is an integral part of Noble’s technique. “One of the worst things you can do with language teaching is teach someone a massive number of words. It’s back-to-front – teach them to speak and then add to their knowledge. You have to become very fluent in a very small amount of the language.” Many students, he says, are led astray by learning numbers, colours or days of the week before they’ve learned any kind of framework with which to use them. “The nouns are almost irrelevant. That’s stuff you can learn yourself.”’

I don’t agree with everything in the article (amongst other things, I don’t think grammatical terminology is a hindrance so long as it’s used to convey structure rather than a goal in its own right), but the bit I quoted here I could almost have said myself.

If language teaching in Scotland has become a case of learning words but no grammar, they really need to go back to square one and start all over again. Their current approach just does not work.

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Amaia (who will be two in January) seems to have a slight issue distinguishing between dentals/alveolars and labials.

‘Hat’ becomes ‘hap’, ‘heart’ becomes ‘harp’, ‘my’ becomes ‘ny’, and ‘mine’ becomes ‘nine’.

It’s not systematic, however – she pronounced ‘daddy’ and ‘mummy’ correctly, and not as *’babby’ and *’nunny’.

Odd.

(And don’t ask me about the photo – it was the only photo suggested to me by Flickr when I put in labial and dental.)

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Jeg bagte forleden æbleskiver med småpigerne.

Jeg havde regnet med, Anna nok ville prøve at vende dem, men jeg blev alligevel lidt overrasket, da Amaia (der fylder 2 den 11. januar) tog spisepinden ud af Annas hånd og fermt løftede en æbleskive fra panden over på tallerkenen!

Alle børnene kunne vældig godt li’ smagen af dem (min æbleskivepande havde forputtet sig, så det var et par år siden, de havde smagt dem sidst), men Marcel var nu mest optaget af, hvor meget han ville kunne sælge dem for i december inde i Glasgow, hvis han lavede sig en lille bod på gågaden…

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Léon fylder seks år i dag, og han kan godt li’ sørøvere, så jeg prøvede at få hans lagkage til at ligne et sørøverskib. (Indeni var det er helt almindelig lagkage med jordbærsyltetøj og kagecreme.)

Jeg tror desværre ikke, det rigtigt lykkedes mig at få skibet til at se ret sørøveragtigt ud – måske var det en dårlig idé at komme flødeskum på siderne?

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During our recent holiday in my parents’ house in Tuscany, we spent a fair amount of time practicing our flying skills on my mother’s broomstick.

Anna wasn’t that great at flying on her own, so I sometimes let her ride on my back.

Léon, on the other hand, was quite capable of flying on his own, although Marcel normally would fly close to him to prevent any accident (see this photo).

Perhaps we should buy broomsticks for the entire family?

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One of the errors Danes often make when speaking English is to say warm when they mean hot (this is caused by Danish having only one word, varm, that covers both meanings).

My stepdaughter, Charlotte, who is 11 years old and has lived with me since she was 6, claims she doesn’t speak a word of Danish, but it’s often apparent that she definitely has an excellent understanding of spoken Danish, even if she tries to hide it. For instance, if I offer some sweets to the three wee ones (who I only ever speak Danish to), Charlotte will instantly ask for some, too.

However, Charlotte has now twice within a few weeks used warm instead of hot. For instance, today she told Phyllis that it had been “very warm in Saarbrücken”.

I can’t think of any good reason why she should be using warm instead of hot apart from influence from Danish, so I can only conclude that Charlotte is now speaking English with a Danish accent!

I’m sure she’ll be horrified and do her best to undo the damage, so I don’t think I’ll tell her just yet…

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