Languages

The tepid grey soup of February in Berlin has taken its toll on people's moods and social activity, and the health of our Kita, where a mini-outbreak of Scharlach, scarlet fever, left J. unscathed. Apart from some sniffles, he has shown more Lebenslust than his parents, spending afternoons in delight at windswept playgrounds where he shows a goat-like interest in climbing and standing atop benches and retaining walls. To this pursuit he adds a favorite game in which he raises a hand and commands papa (or mama) to "Fall down!" He says this so imperiously that, Caroline points out, it's lucky he says it in English, not German–a language in which so many commands sound just wrong.

The already-interesting process of toddler language development, which we have been watching with amusement and amazement, gains a wrinkle when a second language is involved. While one bilingual kid we know, who has a German father and a Russian mother, learns a given word in one language or the other, not both, J. is of the both-and school, sometimes even translating to us when we're both present: "Bus!" he says to me, then he turns to his mama and says "Bus" with the German pronunciation: "Boose!" Once, when he wanted a package of gummy bears opened (not that we would), he suggested using a knife: "Knife, papa!" When I pretended I couldn't find one, he turned to Caroline: "Mama, Messer!" When you have two languages, you have two ways to try to get what you want.

Particularly fun of late have been the expressions in which he mixes the two languages. "Nacke boy laufen" refers to running while naked after getting out of the bath, while "Snow Anzug" is a snowsuit. Learning the numbers from one to ten, he once got up to eight (with some help), then said "Noooo!" in place of nine, which, it occurred to us, is a homonym of "Nein," every 21-month-old's favorite word. Now counting starts with "one, two" and then usually goes straight to the punch line, "Nooo!"

Speaking of "no," we incorporated a technique developed by J.'s Opa, my father-in-law, in which you respond to "Nein" by questioning, "Oder doch?" ("Or maybe yes?") J. heard this from us often enough that he began saying it himself, negating his own negation: "Nein...oder doch?" Soon he added other, absurdist variations such as "oder das" (or that), "oder danke" (or thank you), and "oder bitte" (or please), which make no sense but show the Kita's good influence on his manners.

J.'s days are spent hearing German at Kita, but even there, English sometimes enters the picture. There are several other English-bilingual kids in his class, and when one has a birthday, "Happy birthday" is sung in English. This explained the eerie bedtime when J. started singing "Happy birthday to you," despite our not having celebrated any birthdays for at least six months. Little German kids of 4 and 5, even before school and without a foreign parent, already seem to know quite a few words of English, presumably through this sort of transmission. And as I know from German class, words such as "Interview," "Training," and "Engagement" have all gotten sucked up into German without much protest: the Germans take a practical and rather non-dogmatic approach to English's steady infiltration.

A new book on bilingualism, I read in a review, mentions among bilingualism's benefits a small disadvantage: marginally slower spoken response times, since bilingual brains have to work extra-hard to make sure words come out in the right language. Occasionally I see this process at work in J., for instance when he says "Schoss" (lap, as in, sit in a lap), which he hears more often from Caroline and his Kita teachers than he hears "lap" from me. He'll let a "Schoss" slip before correcting himself: "Schoss...lap!" The same with "Zimmer...room!" when he wants to go to his room.

Perhaps my favorite irregularities, as a student of what Mark Twain correctly called the awful German language, are the small mistakes J. makes in his German, vindicating what feel like logical impulses that the language constantly thwarts. The neutral "Wasser" is correctly "heisses Wasser" when it's hot, but J. says "heisser Wasser" (masculine), betraying a Romance-language affinity for matching sounds over German's impenetrable logic. He also does his plurals with an English S instead of a German N: "Alle Vögels sind schon da" ("All the birds are there") came out one of his very first sentences recently. It's the first line of a children's song, and his using "Vögels" instead of the correct "Vögeln" was music to my anglophone ear.

I wonder if bilingualism, with its heightening of the ear's sensitivity, produces better mimics. J. had moussaka for the first time the other night, and as a symptom of his love for it, he has been saying the word with a creditable Greek pronunciation ever since, putting the accent on the "ka." After mastering his mother's name, he has been trying to learn mine, which first came out as a smooshed and ellided "Allehenny" but emerged triumphantly last night in all its six syllables, the tricky X included. In a children's book about a poodle traveling to European capitals, the appearance of a "London bus" prompted his first efforts to pronounce a phrase in a comical way: after saying the words normally, he said them again and again in a strange garbled accent (a guess at an English accent?), finding this overwhelmingly funny until we did too.

In a similar vein, a few months ago he laughed at the effort of his babysitter, who is bilingual in German and Bulgarian but light on English, to pronounce the line "Goodnight air" from "Goodnight, Moon." What came out– "Goodnight, Eier"–was hilarious to J., either because saying goodnight to "Eier" (eggs) is funny, or because the idea of an adult mispronouncing a word was funny, or maybe for some other, more mystifying reason. You never really know what's going on in a toddler's brain.