Categories: family, language, denmark
Date: 22 February 2009 15:52:19
Auntie Kerensa is very proud of her twin niece and nephew, Northern Star and Big Lad. As regular readers will know, the children are almost entirely bi-lingual as they have a Danish mother and an English father. As they are only 10 years old (the twins, not their parents), they are still learning both languages. I find the whole process quite fascinating.
In Denmark, children go to school and start the formal learning process a lot later than in England (at about age 7 rather than 4 or 5 as in the UK) and yet they seem to whizz along and be almost at the same stage as their English counterparts within a much shorter space of time.
For example, their English cousin, Bex, who is only 6 months older, was once reading them a bedtime story when they were all 7 years old. She felt very grown up and important as the twins had not yet started to learn to read. She read the words very fluently and we all enjoyed listening. [As an aside: She came to a word she didn't recognise and said "Mum, what's this word?" Before Mum could move, Big Lad said "scissors". Our eyes popped out of our heads - until we realised that he had heard the story several times and knew what was coming next!]
Now, three years later, the twins are able to read and write almost as fluently in Danish and English as Bex does in just English - which I find amazing as they haven't had any formal training in English - and given that our spelling is not exactly straightforward, this is quite an achievement.
However, their English is not yet quite perfect as I discovered when I sent a text message to Northern Star the other day. I told her that the weather was quite mild. What was it like in Denmark? She replied:
"Its sunning in denmark love me xxx"
She had taken the form "it's raining, it's snowing" and applied it to the sun. Logical, really. I think I'm going to use this from now on.
And just in case you're interested: it's sunning in the Ancient Roman City this afternoon - although it's clouding over a bit now.