Is your baby creating Spanglish verbs? Mine does! As they develop their bilingual vocabulary it’s really fun to see how they conjugate verbs in both languages. Do you have one to share?

Here are some of our SpanglishBaby verbos shared by a few of our SpanglishBaby Playground amigas:

Ligia:  “corring” en vez de “corriendo” y “canting” en lugar de “cantando” son algunas de las palabras que mi hijo ha dicho.

Audrey: “My daughter always says “sendar” for “mandar” or “enviar.” Ella siempre me dice, “Le voy a sendar esa carta a mi abuelita”

Melissa: “Voy a bringuer las cosas conmigo…Mom, she gasts all of our time/money/paint.”  First of all, he’s supposed to be speaking to me in Spanish! and yes, he does use gasts as if it were an English word for waste.  As a teacher of English as a second language, I often hear native Spanish speakers say things like “We didn’t waste our time on reading/homework” simply meaning that they didn’t spend enough time on something  (gastar covering the meaning of both waste and spend).  For some reason it boggled my mind that the exact same error also popped up in the reverse!”

 What verbos are your kids mixing? We’d like to know! You can follow the conversation on SpanglishBabyPlayground

{Picture by  mikebaird }

Did that headline shock you? It shocked me to write it and admit it because I’ve been claiming for years now that my 5-year old is completely bilingual. I mean, we’re doing everything right, or at least we were for a while.

First let me tell you why and how I realized she’s not as bilingual as I thought and then I’ll explain where I think we messed up.

Fisher-Price invited Roxana and I to be one of their Play Ambassadors and, as such, we have some trips we’ll be taking with them during the year. One of the trips is a visit to the Azul Beach, a Karisma hotel in the Riviera Maya, to learn how children reach developmental milestones around the world and in different cultures. I took advantage of this opportunity to arrive a few days early and bring my daughter with me to Cancun to visit my sister-in-law, her husband and my niece and nephew — Camila’s primos. The trip was long overdue since we hadn’t seen them in two years and had only kept in touch through Skype and such.

Of course, I was super excited because this would mean Camila would not only get to nurture the bond with her primos, but also to polish her Spanish the week before starting kindergarten at the dual immersion program she was accepted into. Even more so since the last month we’ve been talking so much about her new school and how it will be mostly in Spanish. She always seems excited and eager, but then, randomly, she’ll spill out that she doesn’t know how to speak Spanish, that she prefers English. I deny it. I insist that she speaks Spanish very well and that she just needs to practice it. She responds that she doesn’t know it that well and that she mixes too much. I keep insisting it’s okay, and that she just needs to practice and not be afraid.

I honestly thought that as soon as we got to Mexico and she was surrounded by her primos she would switch that imaginary Spanish chip on. It’s been two days and it’s not turning on.

Camila and her primos had an immediate connection, especially with her prima who is only three months older than her; they’ve been inseparable and loving to each other. The way the relationship is developing is that Camila speaks to them in English and they respond in Spanish — just like what’s been happening at home. They kinda understand English and Camila understands Spanish perfectly, so there’s no real need for her to speak it. I’ve nagged a bit with the “Aquí hablamos español” and such, just like I did last year when we went to El Salvador, but it doesn’t seem to be working this time. Plus, I don’t want to force it on her at all.

I do see her trying and she’ll throw words in Spanish here and there, but the truth I’ve had a hard time admitting is that she can’t string conversational sentences together like she can in English — not even close.

And here is where I realized where I had messed up. Back in February, Camila was accepted into a fabulous dual immersion program in Spanish. That day was full of excitement, but also of a sense of relief that I could finally relax with the Spanish exposure. Meaning, my husband and I still talk to her only in Spanish, but we now allow television and music in English; we no longer translate the books we read out loud to Spanish; and we got lazy about asking her to respond to us in Spanish. Aside from that, her pre-school was in English — because we had no choice, — so her exposure to it was vast and her language of play became English.

Now, faced with the realization that she’s not truly as outward and expressive bilingual as I thought, I wonder if I did her a disservice or if it will all really come to her once she starts kindergarten next week?

I’m sure it’s all in her, and maybe I’ll be surprised by the end of the week when she’s had plenty of immersion and her Spanish would have flourished again. Regardless, it’s been a good wake up call that this journey to true bilingualism requires plenty of attention and awareness, and that I need to follow my own advice a whole lot more.

Please share with me in the comments, have you had a bilingual setback with your kids or yourself? How did you deal with it?

One of the the things that can put parents who are raising bilingual children off the most – aside from their kid not responding back in the target language – is when they start mixing languages. Our first thought is that our child is falling “behind” in terms of language acquisition, but nothing can be further from the truth.

My girl is almost five years old now and is very aware that she’s about to start a new stage in her life in a few months when she enters kindergarten in a dual language immersion program in Spanish. Up until now she’s been attending an English-only Montessori and speaking Spanish at home and with family and friends. What’s happened is that her language of play and of “academics” (ABC’s, etc) has been mostly in English. I do supplement at home, but she’ s not very open to learning with me. So now that we’re talking about how she’ll have teachers who speak only in Spanish and she’ll be learning to read and write in Spanish, she’s become oddly aware that she mixes languages.

I realized this last week because I had to take her to an assessment test for her new school where they would evaluate at what level she’s at with her letters and numbers in Spanish to help the teacher prepare class materials, divide the two classes, etc. I was preparing her for this by telling her she’d be speaking in Spanish and they wanted to know how beautifully she spoke. Then, she stopped me and very seriously said, “Pero yo hablo inglés, mamá.” Yes, she has a way of telling me these things in Spanish and utterly contradicting herself. I reminded her that she spoke Spanish really well and she just needed to turn on her Spanish brain chip  when there. Her response: “But I mix them.”

And she’s right. She does mix them, a lot.

What I loved about this conversation was the fact that she’s aware that she mixes the two languages. I’m not quite sure if this is something a teacher told her, if we’ve unconsciously mentioned it in front of her or if she just came to this realization all on her own. The important thing was to reassure her that it is okay, and it really is.

Mixing languages at this early age is just a phase and actually one that indicates she has a perfect grasp of both languages. What she does is considered one of the first phases of code-switching and experts agree it takes a well-nurtured bilingual brain to be able to master it. It’s not laziness or lack of knowledge of the languages, it’s just a natural phase in which she’s sorting out both languages and learning when and where to use each. Since English still dominates my girl’s language of play, it’s easier for her to switch to it when she’s playing hide-n-seek with me or when she’s explaining something that happens at school. She mixes in Spanish with me because she’s making a real effort to speak only Spanish and tries wherever she can. However, when she’s in school she pretty much sticks to English because she knows they don’t understand Spanish at all. Am I making sense?

Psycholinguist Elizabeth Lanza describes in her book Language Mixing in Infant Bilingualism: A Sociolinguistic Perspective what my girl is doing as language socialization, meaning that the child learns when it’s appropriate to mix languages and when it’s not. Lanza also explains that “for the child growing up bilingually, learning when and where not to code-switch is an important aspect of language socialization.”

One of the reasons our blog is called SpanglishBaby (aside from the fact it just sounds fun!) is that we recognized early on that all our bilingual (Spanish/English) kids would eventually go through this phrase and we want to embrace it for what it is. If you’re going through this now, or will get there eventually, just know that the most important thing is to not make a big deal about it in front of your child. You can always check out these 5 Ways To Respond When Your Child Mixes Languages and heed our expert’s advice when asked What to Do If My Child Mixes Languages.

Share: Is your child mixing languages or has she/he? Tell us about it!