2 Spaniards raising Eng-Spa bilingual children in Spain
May 23, 2019 17:03:45 GMT 9
Post by Raquel on May 23, 2019 17:03:45 GMT 9
Haha. You got me; I am.
You know how the saying goes: the student surpasses the master...
True! I'm actually counting on that. 
Also, kids pick up the uses on their own. No later than this afternoon, my eldest corrected herself because she had said "4 legs green" instead of "4 green legs". She started to proudly ramble on about how she had intuitively known it was wrong and that it is the number before the colour. I have never in my life explained that to her. She simply picked it up from years of hearing it.....
That's amazing, Amy! I thought it was something you told her when she made that mistake. Wow! Good for her, coming up with that on her own.
Well, today I have a confession to make: Remember how I always say that I always, *always* speak to my kids in the ml, even if their friends are present, and that I translate? Well, yesterday, my daughter had 2 friends over. I stuck to English with my kids, as usual, until, at one point, I lectured my daughter... in Spanish
... Oops! In my mind, I was speaking English, thinking no one but my kids understood me. When I realized what I had just done I tried to fix it, reverting to English: "Did you understand what I just said?" And then repeating the gist of it in English. My daughter didn't say a word, just looked at me funny *insert embarrassed smiley here*. I laugh about it now, but at the time, it was pretty embarrassing!Edited to add: I neglected to mention that my daughter is using ML words in between her ml sentences lately. Just yesterday, she told me something like: "Today at school, I told my teacher that me picaba (I was itchy)". It happens with lots of everyday words she knows. I imagine she just doesn't recall the word she wants to use in the ml, so she uses the ML equivalent. This would be great when she's older and we can speak Spanglish -my favorite language
- but I can't allow it now that she's 5 and her ML is getting stronger every day. It may be 1 word every other day, but it didn't happen before, so I feel I need to do something about it. So far, I've just asked what it is she said. If she comes up with the ml word, that's it. If she doesn't, she usually asks how to say it in the ml and I tell her.
