4 ms·

I've lived in Germany for twenty years, and despite speaking what I would consider a merely adequate and certainly not native level of German, I've noticed that

I've lived in Germany for twenty years, and despite speaking what I would consider a merely adequate and certainly not native level of German, I've noticed that there's something a bit off about how I speak English. It's glaringly apparent when I'm back in Texas. Like the author, I make some strange word choices that are almost like direct translations from German, and it's had an effect on my grammar, too. We're raising our kid to be bilingual (my husband is German), but I wonder how truly "native" my kid's English will be with me as his main source of it.

wheels 2y ago
I'm also a Texan in Germany, and my German's good enough that it often takes people a few minutes to notice I'm not a native speaker. (Left the US at 21, am now 44.) I definitely also have a lot of German artifacts in my spoken English at this point. At one point I was given the attempted compliment of, "Wow, your English is really good" – because I apparently almost sound like a native speaker. ;-) My children are 6 and 9 and we've raised them tri-lingual. They mostly sound native in all three, but their Serbo-Croatian and English have some German artifacts as well. Also their vocabulary isn't quite at the age-appropriate level in English since I'm basically the only person they regularly use it with, and if I don't use a word with them, they probably don't know it. This may start to change now that my oldest has also begun reading books in English. (That went surprisingly quickly; once he started with English classes in the third grade, within 3-6 months, he no longer had a definite preference for books in German over English.) The trap to be careful of is if your family language is German that the kids eventually stop answering in their parent's language. This seems to be easier when three distinct languages are in play, possibly. Since I speak English with their mom (Serbian), there's less pull towards the "outside" language (German). Oddly, the language the speak with each other has remained Serbo-Croatian. I'd always expected that to eventually change to German, but seems unlikely at their current ages. We mostly attribute this to them having sometimes spent several weeks alone with their grandparents in Serbia when they were young, and that being the only time they only spoke a single language for up to a month, and that having solidified it as their preferred language.
joseda-hg 2y ago
I wouldn't worry too much about it, English is prevalent and useful enough that as long as gets to a reasonable level early enough, he should be able to pick stuff that separate him from your specific manerisms Tangentially related, I see more and more kids developing a "TV Accent" in Spanish in their early years which eventually gets replaced with their local one I'm guessing based on their exposure to parents and media vs School/Parents/Every day life
rednafi 2y ago
Sports machen?
aaplok 2y ago
> I wonder how truly "native" my kid's English will be with me as his main source of it. My experience is that it gets hard when they realise that they can get away with only German. Many kids choose to only use the "primary" language, even when spoken in the secondary one. They eventually regret that choice when they get to their twenties. Not all kids do that though. I am not sure what influences this, but as a parent of trilingual children, my recommendation is to expose them to the culture as much as you can. Talk to family online, take them to English speaking places and countries, watch movies. In other words, make speaking English useful to them. If your family in the US have older kids, yours might end up looking up to them - mine have an older cousin who is one of their favourite members of the family and definitely gives motivation to communicate. Also, be more stubborn than them if they try to only speak German. Sorry if this comes across as unsolicited advice. Nothing I said is revolutionary and you might already have thought it through. We got very lucky with ours, but this is stuff I would have benefitted from when our kids were young, so I'm passing it on.
- MandieD 2y ago
  Not at all - I appreciate it!
- seszett 2y ago
  > Also, be more stubborn than them if they try to only speak German. I think that's the main thing. I have been very stubborn in "not understanding" the other (local) language with my children, even if it's obvious to them I do understand it. Today (they are still young) they speak both languages, including between themselves, and they don't seem to have a preference for one language over the other.
stevoski 2y ago
“Are you coming with?” After a few years living in Germany (as a native English speaker), my English and that of my friends became peppered with these German-isms.
- Clamchop 2y ago
  This example at least sounds perfectly natural to me, in California. I can remember my dad saying it, who was also a born and raised Californian. No German around whatsoever, shrug.
- bradrn 2y ago
  I say this as a native English speaker… but I speak South African English (or something similar), and I’ve heard that this expression is due to Afrikaans influence!
  - stavros 2y ago
    That's probably because Afrikaans is Dutch, and Dutch is German.
    - bradrn 2y ago
      Well, ‘is’ isn’t quite the right word… but they’re all closely related languages, yes, which is why I mentioned it.
      - stavros 2y ago
        Yep, I was being liberal with "is" there, but hopefully the point came across.
        jessekv 2y ago
        Dutch is German, and English is French.
        2y ago
shermantanktop 2y ago
I grew up in a many-lingual house and really only know English, though I am trying to finally learn proper German. But my word choices and pronunciations are definitely not 100% native. There are moments where I can feel the vtable pointing me to the wrong language for a word. Sometimes I get back to English, sometimes I pause, and sometimes a word from some other language pops out. As an example I sometimes say “no thank you” in Swedish in situations where that is wildly wrong. I can’t speak Swedish, but I have those basic phrases in there.
pjmlp 2y ago
Similar timeframe in Germany, not only did my English got worse, even though I have more years of speaking English (since the age of 10), I also occasionally miss some Portuguese words, my native tongue. Thankfully hearing it regularly keeps me up to date, though there are those moments where right in the middle of a conversation I have to stop and reflect on how exactly something is named.
lqet 2y ago
Lately I noticed that I cannot even speak my native German dialect as easily as when I was a teenager (I moved away from home to university when I was 20). I often hesitate because I am not sure whether some word I said was correct in my native dialect, or the local dialect where I live now, or the dialect of my wife (Swiss German). At home, we speak a wild mixture of 3 different dialects and standard German. Our 5-year-old mainly speaks standard German because that's what they speak at kindergarten (most of the teachers don't speak the dialect, and there is a significant number of French, Italian, Ukrainian, and Syrian kids for which learning the dialect would be even harder). At work, I speak a mixture of English and standard German. After living in Germany for nearly 10 years, but working in Switzerland, my wife recently had an identity crisis because a Swiss colleague thought she was German, and had just learned Swiss German very well.
FlyingSnake 2y ago
I have the same experience as well. After living in Germany for 12+ years, my English sometimes has this weird mix of English words and German grammar. My daughter however speaks fluent English and German so I don’t think they’ll have the same problems.
- gizajob 2y ago
  If English had German grammar : https://youtu.be/50jkO2s4Sp0?si=fvPfoJW9WKG51IL- https://youtu.be/50jkO2s4Sp0?si=fvPfoJW9WKG51IL-
  - ahazred8ta 2y ago
    If English had no non-germanic vocabulary: the classic Uncleftish Beholding essay on atomic theory https://anglish.fandom.com/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding https://anglish.fandom.com/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding
impossiblefork 2y ago
Some youths in Sweden are doing this in Swedish, being unable to properly communicate in their native language. Their English is usually not that great either though. Some are foreigners, others are extreme nerds who have failed to interact with people and have lived on the internet. It's really sad.
- kzrdude 2y ago
  Learning language is a lifelong journey, I'm convinced we continue to master our native language as well as we age. Maybe more so if we care and pay attention to it. So I hope there is still hope for some of the youth.. And I would add that I think becoming more than proficient in and deepening understanding of one's own language (Swedish in that case) is important, in parallel with learning foreign languages.
Obscurity4340 2y ago
After I read anything German, i cant stop myself from pronouncing all the s's as z's for a few days
jwarden 2y ago
I am also raising a bilingual 3–year-old in Spain. I speak to him only in English. But i have recently read The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris, which argues convincingly that his English will be limited in certain important ways unless he also has a native English-speaking peer group.

wheels 2y ago

I'm also a Texan in Germany, and my German's good enough that it often takes people a few minutes to notice I'm not a native speaker. (Left the US at 21, am now 44.) I definitely also have a lot of German artifacts in my spoken English at this point. At one point I was given the attempted compliment of, "Wow, your English is really good" – because I apparently almost sound like a native speaker. ;-) My children are 6 and 9 and we've raised them tri-lingual. They mostly sound native in all three, but their Serbo-Croatian and English have some German artifacts as well. Also their vocabulary isn't quite at the age-appropriate level in English since I'm basically the only person they regularly use it with, and if I don't use a word with them, they probably don't know it. This may start to change now that my oldest has also begun reading books in English. (That went surprisingly quickly; once he started with English classes in the third grade, within 3-6 months, he no longer had a definite preference for books in German over English.) The trap to be careful of is if your family language is German that the kids eventually stop answering in their parent's language. This seems to be easier when three distinct languages are in play, possibly. Since I speak English with their mom (Serbian), there's less pull towards the "outside" language (German). Oddly, the language the speak with each other has remained Serbo-Croatian. I'd always expected that to eventually change to German, but seems unlikely at their current ages. We mostly attribute this to them having sometimes spent several weeks alone with their grandparents in Serbia when they were young, and that being the only time they only spoke a single language for up to a month, and that having solidified it as their preferred language.

joseda-hg 2y ago

I wouldn't worry too much about it, English is prevalent and useful enough that as long as gets to a reasonable level early enough, he should be able to pick stuff that separate him from your specific manerisms Tangentially related, I see more and more kids developing a "TV Accent" in Spanish in their early years which eventually gets replaced with their local one I'm guessing based on their exposure to parents and media vs School/Parents/Every day life

rednafi 2y ago

Sports machen?

aaplok 2y ago

> I wonder how truly "native" my kid's English will be with me as his main source of it. My experience is that it gets hard when they realise that they can get away with only German. Many kids choose to only use the "primary" language, even when spoken in the secondary one. They eventually regret that choice when they get to their twenties. Not all kids do that though. I am not sure what influences this, but as a parent of trilingual children, my recommendation is to expose them to the culture as much as you can. Talk to family online, take them to English speaking places and countries, watch movies. In other words, make speaking English useful to them. If your family in the US have older kids, yours might end up looking up to them - mine have an older cousin who is one of their favourite members of the family and definitely gives motivation to communicate. Also, be more stubborn than them if they try to only speak German. Sorry if this comes across as unsolicited advice. Nothing I said is revolutionary and you might already have thought it through. We got very lucky with ours, but this is stuff I would have benefitted from when our kids were young, so I'm passing it on.

MandieD 2y ago
Not at all - I appreciate it!
seszett 2y ago
> Also, be more stubborn than them if they try to only speak German. I think that's the main thing. I have been very stubborn in "not understanding" the other (local) language with my children, even if it's obvious to them I do understand it. Today (they are still young) they speak both languages, including between themselves, and they don't seem to have a preference for one language over the other.

stevoski 2y ago

“Are you coming with?” After a few years living in Germany (as a native English speaker), my English and that of my friends became peppered with these German-isms.

Clamchop 2y ago
This example at least sounds perfectly natural to me, in California. I can remember my dad saying it, who was also a born and raised Californian. No German around whatsoever, shrug.
bradrn 2y ago
I say this as a native English speaker… but I speak South African English (or something similar), and I’ve heard that this expression is due to Afrikaans influence!
- stavros 2y ago
  That's probably because Afrikaans is Dutch, and Dutch is German.
  - bradrn 2y ago
    Well, ‘is’ isn’t quite the right word… but they’re all closely related languages, yes, which is why I mentioned it.
    - stavros 2y ago
      Yep, I was being liberal with "is" there, but hopefully the point came across.
      - jessekv 2y ago
        Dutch is German, and English is French.
        2y ago

shermantanktop 2y ago

I grew up in a many-lingual house and really only know English, though I am trying to finally learn proper German. But my word choices and pronunciations are definitely not 100% native. There are moments where I can feel the vtable pointing me to the wrong language for a word. Sometimes I get back to English, sometimes I pause, and sometimes a word from some other language pops out. As an example I sometimes say “no thank you” in Swedish in situations where that is wildly wrong. I can’t speak Swedish, but I have those basic phrases in there.

pjmlp 2y ago

Similar timeframe in Germany, not only did my English got worse, even though I have more years of speaking English (since the age of 10), I also occasionally miss some Portuguese words, my native tongue. Thankfully hearing it regularly keeps me up to date, though there are those moments where right in the middle of a conversation I have to stop and reflect on how exactly something is named.

lqet 2y ago

Lately I noticed that I cannot even speak my native German dialect as easily as when I was a teenager (I moved away from home to university when I was 20). I often hesitate because I am not sure whether some word I said was correct in my native dialect, or the local dialect where I live now, or the dialect of my wife (Swiss German). At home, we speak a wild mixture of 3 different dialects and standard German. Our 5-year-old mainly speaks standard German because that's what they speak at kindergarten (most of the teachers don't speak the dialect, and there is a significant number of French, Italian, Ukrainian, and Syrian kids for which learning the dialect would be even harder). At work, I speak a mixture of English and standard German. After living in Germany for nearly 10 years, but working in Switzerland, my wife recently had an identity crisis because a Swiss colleague thought she was German, and had just learned Swiss German very well.

FlyingSnake 2y ago

I have the same experience as well. After living in Germany for 12+ years, my English sometimes has this weird mix of English words and German grammar. My daughter however speaks fluent English and German so I don’t think they’ll have the same problems.

gizajob 2y ago
If English had German grammar : https://youtu.be/50jkO2s4Sp0?si=fvPfoJW9WKG51IL- https://youtu.be/50jkO2s4Sp0?si=fvPfoJW9WKG51IL-
- ahazred8ta 2y ago
  If English had no non-germanic vocabulary: the classic Uncleftish Beholding essay on atomic theory https://anglish.fandom.com/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding https://anglish.fandom.com/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding

impossiblefork 2y ago

Some youths in Sweden are doing this in Swedish, being unable to properly communicate in their native language. Their English is usually not that great either though. Some are foreigners, others are extreme nerds who have failed to interact with people and have lived on the internet. It's really sad.

kzrdude 2y ago
Learning language is a lifelong journey, I'm convinced we continue to master our native language as well as we age. Maybe more so if we care and pay attention to it. So I hope there is still hope for some of the youth.. And I would add that I think becoming more than proficient in and deepening understanding of one's own language (Swedish in that case) is important, in parallel with learning foreign languages.

Obscurity4340 2y ago

After I read anything German, i cant stop myself from pronouncing all the s's as z's for a few days

jwarden 2y ago

I am also raising a bilingual 3–year-old in Spain. I speak to him only in English. But i have recently read The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris, which argues convincingly that his English will be limited in certain important ways unless he also has a native English-speaking peer group.