visit to family and other things

So we went to Arkansas for a week and K came back with a northern accent. Whatever you call the way the asparagus kid from Veggie Tales talks. Or Kai-Lan, as I recall. I'm going to assume it came from one of those sources rather than being a direct result of the visit, although it did come on very suddenly, in the airport as we left. It's wearing off a little now, but for a while there it was very distinct and if K accidentally said something in her "normal" accent, she quickly corrected herself. Obviously an affectation then, but a quite random and amusing one.

Though I will say she sounds noticeably more American now even discounting the newly discovered accent. I think that WAS a result of the visit.

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This was the first chance the family had to meet Baby M. He was a rousing success.

K really enjoyed showing off her little brother, and her dance moves, and her ability to jump on one foot.

I had to bite the NIP in USA bullet (first visit with K was when she was older, so it was easy enough to avoid it), and nobody spontaneously combusted, so that was encouraging. People in the South are either becoming more tolerant or less observant, it seems!

It was also the first visit where K cried when we left - I think it's the first time she really understood what was going on and how long we go between visits. She had a hard time saying goodbye and cried a few times over the next day or two once we got home, too.

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At one point during our visit I overheard K ask her cousin of the same age, "You speak English, right? Do you speak Czech and Slovak, too?" Her cousin didn't respond in the slightest, obviously had no clue what K was on about.

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Baby M turned 5 months yesterday. The day before that, the Slovak was holding him in his lap while eating a banana, and M grabbed the banana and stuffed it in his mouth. We were PLANNING to wait a full six months before introducing solids (with K we had a ceremonial first bite of food on her half-birthday, which she obviously immediately spit out), but in the spirit of baby-led weaning I decided to go with it. That, and the boy wasn't going to willingly let go. Also as of this weekend he can sit up without support. He's been busy.

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Also while in Arkansas I found that my children, while comfortable navigating public transportation in any European city you might suggest, are not at all adapted for hopping in and out of the car all day as one does in America. They both complained STRENUOUSLY about the long car rides, anything over 15 minutes being met with a "But that's SO LONG!" from K. No wonder - we use our car once or twice a week in Prague and only for 15 minute trips most of the time. M missed traveling in his comfy wrap and K missed being able to walk everywhere. Fortunately February/March in Arkansas is acceptable walking weather, so we did walk more than normal, but only a bit more: America is simply not built for pedestrians! But everyone knows that, anyway.

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And now we're all fighting colds, all but the baby, that is. He is too busy munching on apples and bananas to bother being unwell. I'm ready for everyone to be healthy so we can get out and enjoy the spring!

Difficulty Making Yourself Understood

It's not just for the foreign language any more!

We just got back from a visit to America. (It was great, fun was had.) While there, we had a few communication challenges to overcome...not counting the Slovak's traditional introduction to new people of "Hi, I'm The Slovak" followed by blank stares at the unfamiliar name.

Early one morning the Slovak went out to get us coffee (is he not a lovely husband?) and came back somewhat depressed. He said the girl working at Starbucks made him repeat everything three times before she understood. He asked me if his English is really that bad or is the girl just not very smart? I suggested maybe it was the lack of a distinct Southern accent that threw her off.

The next few times we went in, he made me order, and I HAD THE SAME PROBLEM. Same girl, made me repeat myself three times, and still got the order wrong. I was able to assure him that it wasn't him, it was her. Poor guy was starting to doubt himself.

Then, for our last meal before getting on the plane, we stopped at Olive Garden. We sat down, then the Slovak and K left for the bathroom. While they were gone, the waiter stopped by for our drink order.

"I'd like two raspberry lemonades and a child's apple juice please."
"OK, and for you?"
"I'm having one of the lemonades."
"So three raspberry lemonades and an apple juice."
"No, no, just two raspberry lemonades."
"But that's only three drinks."
"There are only three of us here. Me, my husband, and my daughter."
"But I could have sworn I saw a tall, bearded guy with glasses walking away from this table a few minutes ago. With a child."
"Yes, that was my husband and my daughter. We're the only ones here."
"OK, you threw me off with the 'three child's lemonades and an apple juice' thing."
"?? No, sorry, I just want two adult raspberry lemonades and a child's apple juice."
"OK, wait, let's start from the beginning. Who all is sitting here today?"
"Two parents, drinking raspberry lemonade. One child, drinking a child's apple juice."
"Yes. But what are YOU having?"
"I'm one of the parents."
"But what about the other person here?"
"Really, no other person. Two raspberry lemonades, one child's apple juice."

I am not even exaggerating. I think I may have left out a couple of exchanges, in fact. Somehow I convinced him to bring the drinks I asked for, and we got them. Eventually. It was very difficult keeping a straight face for the last half of the conversation.

Good grief. :)

The Language of Her Peers

If pregnancy hasn't impaired my ability to count - which is by no means a given - then we've been back in Prague for six months. Six months of increased exposure to Czech, and I have to say I'm pretty impressed with where K is at, especially when you consider that most of her progress has been since January at her new school.

The Slovak and I have been noticing recently how her active vocabulary keeps growing - she can tell him offhand what something is called rather than thinking about it for five minutes first. Her grammar is not great, but frankly, what three year old's grammar is? Her English grammar can be pretty sketchy at times, but it is better than her Czech grammar. However, she is really moving past the individual words and set phrases and making her own sentences.

I think the longest/most correct one to date was "Já nechci volat Babku!" (I don't want to call Grandma!) Not the kindest sentiment, maybe, but a spontaneous expression of her feelings in Czech!

Popular set phrases include:

Já to umím sama! / I can do it myself
Teta, já chci pití! / (to teacher) I want a drink
Dej mi to! / Give me that
Koukej! / Look
Vidis! / See?
To nejde! / It won't work, I can't do it

Several of those are marked, as the Slovak complains to me bitterly, by a distinct Prague accent. Last week she talked about a "pejsek" (instead of a havo!). Or today at school, as she was getting herself dressed to go, I said, "Vidíš, jak to umíš sama" (See, you can do it yourself!) and K replied, "Ale ne-umíííím!" So perfectly Pragueish! I think it's adorable - and inevitable - and of course having learned the language here I speak Pragueish Czech, too. But the Slovak, as an Easterner, is finding that he's a little less reconciled to little Czech-speaking children than he once thought. He can handle a pejsek, but I'm pretty sure if K comes home talking about sejr one day, we'll be on the next train to Košice!

Basically this is the flip side of my mixed feelings last year on K's British accent in English. There is something fundamentally jarring about your child speaking to you in a different dialect than the one you use. Like a tiny stranger is living in your house. If we ever (as we hope) move to Slovakia, this won't be the only reason - but it won't be the least important, either.

For now, though, the essential thing is - K can communicate and is learning to talk just like her friends! That's the way things should be.

Voice recognition technology doesn't speak Scottish

I'm usually late to the party with regard to online videos and similar, so you may have seen this already. But it made me laugh pretty hard.

Voice recognition technology doesn't speak Scottish

The Stubbornness She Gets From Her Father

"Mama, come dole!"
"You should really say either 'come down' or 'poď dole'."
"Come dole."
"Try 'come down'."
"Come dole."
"How about 'poď dole'?"
"Poď down."
"OK, now she's doing this on purpose."

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Also, a couple of weeks ago K started talking about "time out", which was odd since we call it "the quiet place" or "the stair". She likes to tell her dolls off a lot. :) Then she started saying something that I eventually decoded as "I'm going to be cross with you!" This caught my attention as it's a very British phrasing that she wouldn't have heard at home, and I couldn't think of anywhere we'd been together where she'd have heard it, either.

This left nursery as the most likely source for both phrases, so on her next school day I asked her teacher if they'd been having disciplinary issues with her. She gave me the answer every parent longs to hear when she said, "Oh no, we never have any problems with K! She must hear us saying that to a couple of the other children who misbehave." I was really hoping she'd say that, but knew it wasn't impossible that K would get in trouble herself, either. The teacher also mentioned that the only thing with K is getting her to keep her shoes and socks on. BE GLAD SHE STOPS WITH THE SOCKS AT NURSERY is all I have to say about that.

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And that is all for tonight. Been kind of busy the last few days so I haven't had a chance to blog until now. More next time!

Conversations with my husband

"I like how you refer to me on there as 'the Slovak'."
"Do you mean you like it or you want me to change it?"
"I mean, you could call me 'the Stud' or something. Just if you wanted to."
"I am totally blogging this."

Sort of like the time he told me I was free to tell anyone about our, ahem, private life, provided I was sufficiently complimentary.

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K brings me a Ferda Mravenec book and insists I read it to her.

"You know, you're really getting a British accent in Czech. I think I can hear it there."
[insert glare and pointed comment about who dragged who to this country]

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And then the other day when I was counting from 1 to 10 in Hungarian, and K was repeating after me:

"Hey, her pronunciation is actually better than yours."
"WHY CAN YOU NEVER SAY ANYTHING POSITIVE ABOUT ME?"

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But when I felt sick this afternoon, who leaped up from his desk and came home to take care of us? It was the Devilishly Handsome, Raven-Haired Slovak of My Dreams!

(There, sweetie, what do you think of that one?)

Betrayed by an "Um"

Or, the importance of non-verbals in language acquisition.

I had a disturbing experience during our visit to Prague a few months ago. You see, usually, if someone asks about my background, they assume I’m:

a Czech who’s been out of the country long enough to get rusty
born abroad with Czech parents/grandparents
Moravian
Slovak
Polish
Ukrainian
Croatian
Russian
French
and so on. In order of most to least flattering.

English-speaking countries are far down the list of common guesses. Even, interestingly, when the person is holding my residence card stating my nationality in their hand (as happened with my doctor the first time anyone ever mistook me for Czech). This is an important point because it shows that my accent, while present, is somewhat difficult to define, in contrast to when I first started learning Czech and my pronunciation screamed AMERICAN IN THE ROOM. Now it is mainly my husband’s OU Sooners (college football) shirt and hat that scream American in the room. He is often stopped by Americans in Prague asking what part of Oklahoma he is from. If he were more of a smart aleck he would say Prague. Pronounced "Pray-g". Cracks me up every time.

My disturbing experience took place on the playground when a mom I was talking with asked me where I was from after just a few sentences of conversation, and without waiting for an answer, she said, “American, right?” She said her father spent several years in the United States and came back saying “uh-huh” all the time, just like I did. I really can’t remember the last time someone guessed I was an American right away during a Czech conversation.

I also recall a few years ago a colleague said to me, “You know, however good your Czech may get, I’ll always know you’re an American by the way you say ‘um’.”
My response? “Um…yeah, I should do something about that.”

I have actually worked to eliminate my “um” and “uh” and similar nonverbal giveaways, but I can’t find anything to replace them with. The Slovak is very little help, as his answer is always, “You shouldn’t say anything like that!” He was taught in school to rephrase whatever he’d just said to give himself time to regroup, rather than using a filler sound like “uh”. That is interesting advice, but it does lead to a lot of repetition. Like, saying the same thing three times in a row. And anyway, I have a deep-seated need to make some sound or hand motion when thinking (of a word or of how to answer a question, etc). I have had some success with replacing “um” and other American nonverbals with more Czechish ones (and in the above mentioned conversation I was actually intending to say “aha”), but the odd “uh-huh” still makes its way through on occasion and outs me to any careful listener. I’m also not sure what to do with “ow”, assuming I don’t want to curse, in which case I would have a wealth of colorful options at my disposal.

Who knew that grammar, vocabulary, word order, pronunciation, intonation and local cultural references, assuming I could ever get that far, weren’t enough? Not that I don’t have plenty to work on with all of those, either! But even if you mastered all of that, you have to be the other language even when not actually talking! After all the nonverbal sounds, of course, come things like posture, volume, facial expressions, shoes (shoes are a dead giveaway for Americans, has anyone else noticed that??), and who knows what else.

I once brought a sick friend (my Czech teacher actually) TWO FLOWERS as a get-well-soon gift, and she laughed and said, “Sometimes I forget you aren’t entirely domesticated yet.” Um, okay… The ridiculous thing is, I KNEW that even numbers of flowers are for funerals. I had even advised foreign visitors of that in the past, but it never crossed my mind when going for a visit myself. It could be worse, I suppose – I have an American friend who brought his Czech wife ten red roses when she gave birth to their first child. Supposedly she practically beat him over the head with them because 1) even numbers are for funerals, and 2) where was her gold jewelry (as he should have given her according to custom)??

On the flip side, there are also Czech nonverbals that I have incorporated pretty fully into English, which I only really realized when I had to translate some of K’s utterances into “English” for my family. For instance, we say “fuj” (ew) whatever the language context, or “ham” (taking a bite) or “ňam ňam” (yum yum). Or Barany buc. I also consider “ahoj” and “čau” (both are “hi” or “bye”) to be pretty much English words at this point. I feel fairly justified in this, since the Slovak claims that “čau” (derived from “ciao”) is actually of Slovak origin.

So there you have it: my second language Achilles heel. I probably have others that I don’t even know about, but this is the main one I am fighting at the moment.

What is it that holds you back in your other language? How does non-verbal communication differ in your other language/country? What should I say instead of “uh-huh” in order not to sound too foreign?? I welcome thoughts on any of these questions!

British Influence

I love living in the UK and it’s been a great experience for us as a family. The Slovak has had the opportunity to live in a Western country, not bad for a boy born in the workers’ paradise. I get treated like an alien invasion at passport control, but I love CBeebies and the concept of meat wrapped in pastry, so I cope. And Baby K doesn’t care one way or the other. (Except about CBeebies and meat wrapped in pastry, which she is entirely on board with.) The timing is pretty good, too, since we’ll return to Czech Republic before my maternity leave runs out* and K starts preschool.

One thing I’m not crazy about with spending our daughter’s first few years here is her accent getting muddled. I know, I know, proper English and all that, but I don’t really like mixed accents. I want my child to speak like other children from (all) her native countries, which I think is fairly reasonable.

When I agreed to move here, I told my husband that as soon as Baby K came home from the playground saying “Mummy, let’s pop round to the shop”, we have to move. She doesn’t call me Mummy yet**, but she does come home from nursery talking about playing in the garden and other Britishisms. Or at the playground, another child asked if she wanted to go fast (tall a) or slow, and she said fast (tall a), though usually she says fast (short a). She also has a couple of particular intonations that she uses all the time that she’s heard on TV and at nursery.

So when she talks about the “pahk” and “gahden” and all, is it just that she can’t say her R’s yet (true), that she can’t say two consonants together yet (true), or is it also the beginnings of a non-rhotic accent??

All in all pretty cute, frankly, but I guess what I’m saying is I don’t really want my child to sound like this guy.

* You read that right. Three years of maternity leave, baby.

** I wrote this a few weeks ago. Since then she has started to call me "Mummaaaaaaaayy" exactly like the kids at her school and her intonations are distinctly British. Cute, but it's time to move!