Laura in Sweden
Jul 27, 2014 7:37:42 GMT 9
Post by Laura on Jul 27, 2014 7:37:42 GMT 9
Hi everyone!
I'm an American, my husband is Austrian, and we've lived in Sweden for nearly 16 years now. One kid is all grown up (19) and getting ready to move to Switzerland to study; the other kid (15) is growing up faster than I'd like
. I've been a part of a bilingual family mailing list since 1995 (I think it was actually one of the first?), and heard about this board through that mailing list. It looks very cool! Anyone else here remember that mailing list? By the way, I haven't mentioned my kids' names because I promised them I'd keep their names off any message boards I participate in...I hope that's ok?
My kids are probably rather older than the kids of most of the board members, so I'm not sure how useful my perspective might be, but perhaps it's interesting to hear from families with grown kids? Both kids are fluently trilingual, and are also solidly literate in all three languages. I'm not quite sure what we did right (or wrong), but somehow it worked out surprisingly better than we anticipated. We always stuck very strictly to OPOL (one parent one language) at all times, and the kids attended normal Swedish schools, so they got daily exposure to all three languages. Both my husband and I are reasonably fluent in all three languages.
I think the fact that they very early on fell completely in love with their American cousins has a lot to do with their very strong English language skills (also the language they both prefer for reading). Somewhere along the line as a teen, my son became very motivated to keep up with German, though I can't figure out quite where that motivation came from. My daughter was always motivated to keep up with German: she and her best friend (bilingual Swedish/German) only speak German with each other.
My son is about to face a new linguistic challenge: he will study electrical engineering as an undergrad at a Swiss university (instruction language in German). He's only ever studied math and physics in Swedish, so I have a feeling he'll be struggling with vocabulary the first few months. It will be very interesting to see how that goes. Anyone ever experience switching to another language for university studies? If so, I'd love to hear how it went for you!
Anyway, nice to meet you all and I'm off now to check out other threads!
I'm an American, my husband is Austrian, and we've lived in Sweden for nearly 16 years now. One kid is all grown up (19) and getting ready to move to Switzerland to study; the other kid (15) is growing up faster than I'd like
. I've been a part of a bilingual family mailing list since 1995 (I think it was actually one of the first?), and heard about this board through that mailing list. It looks very cool! Anyone else here remember that mailing list? By the way, I haven't mentioned my kids' names because I promised them I'd keep their names off any message boards I participate in...I hope that's ok?My kids are probably rather older than the kids of most of the board members, so I'm not sure how useful my perspective might be, but perhaps it's interesting to hear from families with grown kids? Both kids are fluently trilingual, and are also solidly literate in all three languages. I'm not quite sure what we did right (or wrong), but somehow it worked out surprisingly better than we anticipated. We always stuck very strictly to OPOL (one parent one language) at all times, and the kids attended normal Swedish schools, so they got daily exposure to all three languages. Both my husband and I are reasonably fluent in all three languages.
I think the fact that they very early on fell completely in love with their American cousins has a lot to do with their very strong English language skills (also the language they both prefer for reading). Somewhere along the line as a teen, my son became very motivated to keep up with German, though I can't figure out quite where that motivation came from. My daughter was always motivated to keep up with German: she and her best friend (bilingual Swedish/German) only speak German with each other.
My son is about to face a new linguistic challenge: he will study electrical engineering as an undergrad at a Swiss university (instruction language in German). He's only ever studied math and physics in Swedish, so I have a feeling he'll be struggling with vocabulary the first few months. It will be very interesting to see how that goes. Anyone ever experience switching to another language for university studies? If so, I'd love to hear how it went for you!
Anyway, nice to meet you all and I'm off now to check out other threads!
