Your intercultural future is starting right now – moving-in together and/or getting engaged!

So you have found a partner from a different culture that you love and want to be with, you have figured out which country you will both live in to make the relationship work, you have met each others' friends and possibly family and now you are ready for the next step…
In most of Europe this next step would mean moving-in together, in the US it would more likely mean getting engaged. Even though we were in the US at the time, we choose to first share an apartment to try out compatibility after a year and a half of long-distance relationship. Our families viewed this step very differently. My mother-in-law was hoping we would get married before we moved-in together and my own mother was hoping we would try living together before we got married.

Living together brings out a whole new set of cultural differences. Even for couples from the same culture, moving together comes with many adjustments because you come from families with different routines and traditions. Most of our disagreements (e.g. which direction to peel carrots or how to fold underwear) weren’t necessarily rooted in our cultural differences. The fact that we were both hard working graduate students with little money was a bigger unifier than our cultures were a divider. Plus: I had slowly adopted quite a few American habits. (How many really, I am only realizing right now, that I am back in Europe!). Two areas of cultural disagreement emerged quickly however: food and holidays – both of which will require an entire blog (which will follow this one over the next couple of weeks).

After living together for about 2 years, it became clear that we wanted to stay together and get married. With this decision, a whole different level of cultural challenges appeared.
First of all, while becoming engaged is the traditional start of the American road to a wedding, most Germans of my generation do not get engaged anymore and if they do, they don’t make a big deal out of it. When we got engaged, we decided to have a picture taken by a friend and send out announcements to friends and family near and far. (Little did we know that the generation of my parents in Germany would see this announcement as a request to give a present - how embarrassing! and a nice example of cross-cultural misunderstanding)
You have to know that getting engaged in America is the starting signal of a (at least one) year long preparation for the big day. Girls are indoctrinated from early on that the wedding day will be the culmination of their life, when they will be the most beautiful and everything has to be perfect. This image not only causes a bride lots of stress (some of it positive, some negative), but requires a lot of money, time and effort. In order to know what you want on your wedding day, you are expected to read bridal magazines, go to bridal shows and decide even the smallest detail in order to create the perfect day. (I guess a lot of Germans put the same effort into the first house that they build, while most American’s just buy one to start off with).

It doesn’t matter whether you are twice divorced or just out of high-school. The announcement of an engagement is bound to produce screams of joy where ever you go followed by the immediate showing-off of your ring finger! I have to admit that I had become “Americanized” enough by the time to look forward to and expect an engagement ring. However I did not want the customary big honking diamond that sticks out like a crown in your finger – too expensive and to impractical! I imagined getting caught on things, scratching along surfaces and really didn’t want such a knuckle-duster. I had made sure that B. knew about my preferences and we had been pseudo ring-shopping a bit, where I pointed out nice flat rings with sapphires in them.
When he proposed, he had picked the ring I wanted: flat with three oval sapphires and two small diamonds! Since it was just before Christmas and I was flying home, I was able to show the ring to friends and relatives in Germany. Everybody was very impressed that I got a piece of jewelry for my engagement and admired the ring. Quite the opposite happened when I returned to the US. The ring was so contrary to American expectations (= one big diamond), that my showing of the ring was often met with an unsure look and quick glance to my face - as in: “Is she really happy with this ring? Should I congratulate or pity her?” You have to realize that the established American cultural expectation for a wedding ring is a stone worth “two or three months salary” of the man and anything less means he doesn’t really love you that much. (This message is nurtured by jewelery store adds, especially around Valentine’s day). So the bigger the stone, the greater the love – theoretically. So just imagine my ring in their expectant eyes… It didn’t help my case that at the same time another girl in my department also got engaged – with a traditional American big rock ring. So, often, when I told people that I got engaged, they said “Oww - show me the ring!?” and not only did just my little sapphires come out, but from the back came an “I got engaged, too” scream and the hand with the honking diamond was shoved over mine. It sure made it difficult for people to say something positive about my unusual ring in the face of cultural perfection.

In-Laws-Relationships – Difficult To Begin With, Challenging If Cross-cultural…

Dating a person from another culture is always an adventure, your differences make it more exciting, but sometimes also more complicated.

Start with the concept of “dating” itself: In most European countries, there is no such thing as an American “date”, where a boy and a girl go out together for one night to do an activity (most often dinner and/or a movie, but also dancing, bowling, etc). The idea behind this being a) test-driving how compatible you are while b) having a defined end to the activity, so that if you don’t like the person, you can get rid of them after 2h without either of you losing face. In Europe, you would not sign up to go out alone with a person you don’t even know. You would either have known them from group activities, friends parties or met them by coincidence (e.g. in a bar) and then decide to spend the evening with them. Thus you already know that you like them and this activity alone together without the buffer of friends already marks the first step towards becoming a couple. There is no such thing as a European girl/boy having multiple dates with multiple people in one week, some of which they know in advance they might not like, but want to test. With the American date comes a set of cultural rules, that are not entirely strict, but apply in the majority of cases: A) The guy asks the girl B) Since he asked, the guy pays for the activity C) Often the guy picks up and drops off the girl (especially, if she still lives at her parent’s house and they want to have a good look at him). D) If you liked the date, you don’t immediately ask for another, but you have to wait a day or three and them make contact again. E) One or two dates with one person does not mean that you are exclusive and it is totally acceptable to go on a date with somebody else in between. At some point – and I myself am not entirely sure when/how that happens most often – the whole “date” procedure is dropped in favor of being exclusive and a couple. But I digress…

What I really wanted to write about is: When you have overcome the differences in dating, you declared yourself “together” and things are getting serious, you are often faced with the prospect of meeting the in-laws. If you are in the same country, this could be sooner, if you are far apart this could be maybe not until wedding plans are made.
I was still in the “this is just part of the foreign experience” mode when my new American boyfriend took me to his parent’s house for the first time, about 2h away from the university town. It was Thanksgiving, a holiday we didn’t celebrate in Germany, so I was eager to go and experience it. On the way there in the car I asked him whether anybody else had ever brought a girl to the Thanksgiving dinner and he assured me that many of his cousins had. “So what happened to them?”, I asked. “Oh, they are all married now!” That freaked me out quite a bit! Parental expectations are hard enough to deal with, but when you have a culture and/or language barrier in addition, you start walking on eggshells. I think this first Thanksgiving encounter went quite well, but I am also sure that I did or said odd things in the eyes of the American family… I’m not sure how often I offended my American (future) mother-in-law unintentionally with my German directness or simple cultural mishaps in those first months (and possibly still today), but I’m sure know it was often. (And my poor boyfriend/husband was stuck in the middle trying to negotiate misunderstandings, realizing where both sides were coming from, but not necessarily knowing how to resolve things.)

When he came to visit me in Germany for the first time – about a year later for Christmas, since I by then had returned to finish my exams - he was exhausted from his first semester of Graduate school and out of whack with his sleeping patterns due to his first jet-lag. I remember sitting at the breakfast table my family waiting for him to show up… - Punctuality is a very big deal for Germans! - We had waited for a while already, so I went to check on him again and he had fallen back asleep! I was embarrassed in front of my parents and I knew they were wondering what kind of listless slacker I had brought home!? (Thankfully that impression changed at some point and – despite him not speaking any German in the beginning - they somehow found a common ground.)

Mothers-in-law are generally a touchy relationship, but when an American friend of mine got married in Germany, she got a good dose of MIL plus German frankness. All Americans believe that a woman is most beautiful on her wedding day (just a Italians find a woman with a baby on her hip most perfect), so when my friend put on her wedding dress and her American mother and friends were oohing and ahhing over it, she turned to her MIL and asked her opinion… and the woman shot back with German honesty: “I don’t think the cut is the best for you and I would take off that bow in the back.” Stunned silence followed from the American side.
A father of a friend, who is Norwegian, always told the story of his first Kaffeetrinken with his future German in-laws. While the Germans tend to say “Thank you” as in “NO thank you”, the Norwegians say “Thank you” as in “YES, thank you”. So after his first cup of coffee and piece of cake, he was offered more several times, kept saying “Thank you” and then didn’t receive anything. But since he wanted to make a good impression, he kept quiet (and hungry and thirsty).

As a general rule, I would say, in-laws become even scarier when they speak another language or come from a different culture! Especially since sons- and daughters-in-law can be scrutinized for faux-pas’ that aren’t even existing in their respective culture - just think of greetings, table manners or dress code … and never mind wedding ceremonies or child-rearing later on!

Do you have a culture clash with your in-laws to add?

Intercultural Relationships – The Lure of the Unknown

If you are raising bilingual children, chances are you are either in an intercultural marriage or living in a foreign country or even both. So before children usually comes courtship, so my next round of blogs will be about intercultural relationships.

So imagine you are a young man or woman about to embark on an adventure in a foreign country – new language, new environment, new customs, new people… new love?

While being at university, I have seen hoards of fellow students go on a “study abroad” program, spend a semester or a year in a foreign country and in addition to improving their language and experiencing something new, they also fell in love. Most become enchanted by the new way of living and the new language – and what better way to experience this different life to the fullest than embracing somebody that embodies all that is new and exciting… After all, the best way to learn a new language is “to sleep with your dictionary”.

Many people that go to live in a foreign country (be it as a student, in the military or on a business assignment) feel lonely at some point – and nothing soothes a lonely heart better love! A new relationship is a great solution, when you are single, however causes problems if you have left a partner at home. At least among the student population not many relationships survived one partner’s stint in a foreign country. (This is not to say that it is impossible to survive a longer separation, but you need to work on it: Not only will you have to keep your partner up to date with new experiences the s/he can’t share, but they have to be secure enough not to succumb to jealousy – be it for the new experiences themselves or towards the people that you now spend a lot of time with).
The lure of the new combined with an exotic setting, is hard to resist. At the same time this spell often quickly gets shattered when you return home. You are faced with the choice of a long-distance relationship or frequent visits in the short term and one of you moving in the long run. Since your feelings have often been intermingled with the experience of the other country and culture, importing your new partner in your old environment is often a sobering experience. Your partner, now a foreigner him/herself, is pushed out of their comfort zone and appears clumsy all of a sudden, where there was self-confidence before. Trying to keep a romance alive that depended on the thrill of the unusual while living back in the ordinary is hard! My friend S. added a second year to her stay in order to extend her romance (but in the end to no avail). Another friend had a fling abroad, but returned to her old boyfriend once at home again.

I was well aware of this very likely outcome of foreign romances when I embarked on my exchange year. At the same time, I was young and single and wanted to experience life to the fullest. So it happened to me – I fell in love … but I wasn’t going to make that obvious mistake! So when another girl showed interest in the boy I started flirting with, I told her, she could have him back after my year in the US was up. I was just wanting a fling. Little did I know I would end up marrying that fling…

Raising Bilingual Children - Links and Blogs

As we all know, the internet is a big maze and if there is a topic dear to your heart, most likely somebody else has written about it already. Same is true for blogs about raising bilingual children. I have put together a short overview of sites I found helpful and informative, most of them have even more links for you to follow and spend endless hours reading and stepping further into the net…

First of all, a good collection of bilingual family blogs can be found on the homepage of the Bilingual/ Bicultural Family Network. They also have a link to the Multilingual Family Magazine, daily bilingual tips, and a resource page with playgroups, publications, organizations as well as general support links and a monthly newsletter.

For a good overview with links to articles and blogs, UK based, click here.

A review of English books about raising bilingual children can be found in this blog.

There is also a publication called the bilingual family newsletter, to which you can subscribe with PayPal.

If you want to read a blog about the academic side and current research about Bilingualism, try this blog by a group of US researchers or Claudia Rinaldi’s site.

Finally, there is a You Tube channel devoted to raising bilingual children with lots of videos.

Enjoy your browsing!

Dominant Language

If you are raising your children bilingually, sooner or later, a dominant language will emerge. While they might be able to communicate in both, there will be a language they prefer and a language they default to. It will most likely be the language they are more exposed to, that their friends speak and that they experience most of life in.

Even adults, who speak more than one language fluently, are not equally fluent it both, they will have times or topics in which they prefer one over the other. When I was pregnant with my first child, I sometimes struggled to tell my parents about it on the phone in German, since all Doctors visits and exams where in English and I had not been exposed to much of that topic while I lived in Germany. German-Greek friends of mine always go to Greece in the summer and thus the kids learned how to sail – and all sailing vocabulary that goes along with it – in Greek and would be hard-pressed to talk about it in another language. If you live in a country that speaks another language you are fluent in, it is only natural that you will expand your vocabulary exponentially there. To this day my specialized seafood and kitchen prep vocabulary is (only) in French, after working in a restaurant in Corsica for 2 summers. Certain feelings will also be dominated by what language you experienced it in. A Russian colleague that lived in France for his teenage years always thought about falling in love in French terms! Friends of mine, to whom I felt like an adopted daughter, would sometimes address me in Romanian in a very emotional moment, because that was their language of family connection.

Finally, I could always tell I had assimilated to a point and started living in the other languages, when I started to dream in it…

When you have children, they will decide at some point, which language they communicate in to each other. If you have a mono-lingual household and a different-speaking environment, they will most likely stick with the inside-outside division of language. In the case of one-parent-one language, they might continue to switch, but more likely will eventually choose one - often the dominant language of the country they live in. (Thus my children by now communicate in English and only rarely switch to German, when I enter the room - they will, however, still always address me in German).

If your children start to show preference for a language that is not yours, it does not mean that they love you less. Of course you want them to experience the important parts of life in the language you grew up with, but that is sometimes impossible. So instead of looking at the loss - can’t recite the poems I grew up with, don’t read all the children's books I identified with, don’t hum songs from my culture when drawing, don’t have joyous outbursts in my language, don’t identify with my country’s team at the Olympics - try to focus on the gains – broader cultural understanding and being bilingual. I know it can be hard at times. If your child is asked whether they prefer to speak X or Y (which some well-meaning, interested strangers do), and they pick *the other* language, it can be like a stab in the back. But they don’t know that, they just say what they feel. If you move countries, the tables might turn to your favor. All you can do for now, is hang on to you language and connect it to as many positive experiences as you possibly can.

Tricks to keep the kids bilingual!

Here is a brief list of ways to incorporate a foreign language into you household:

The best way to teach your kids is, of course, speaking to them a lot and only in the target language. But our lives are busy, we have to work and do chores, so we are not constantly able to shower our children with speech.

However, if you have the time, make it count. As tempted as I am by the beautiful English books in our house and at the library, I ONLY read German ones to the kids. (It has the added benefit that I can reread my childhood favorites and make a connection to “When Mama was a little girl…”) If the kids want a specific English book or brought a book home from school, they have to wait for their Dad to come home and read with them. This division of books has been there from the very beginning and when we got a new one, the first question often was “Is this a Mama book or a Papa book?”.

When they got older, I also purchased some books on CD for them to listen to and 80% of the time we listen to German children’s songs in the car - especially around Christmas time! If this is the only entertainment available, they tend not to complain and I often get rewarded by hearing them sing the songs in their rooms later!

TV in our house is quite restricted. We avoided commercial television from the beginning and when we started to introduce DVDs, we did so only in German! The combination of kids occupied + learning another language + defined end of TV time was priceless for us! For a while they didn’t realize some movies could have different language tracks. I remember my youngest coming home from the dentist (who had a TV in the waiting room) telling me incredulously: “Mama, Nemo spoke ENGLISH!” By now, we also own English DVDs – mainly given as presents – but I still make a point to alternate languages when it comes to TV. I just feel that, if they are already watching TV at least they can broaden their vocabulary at the same time.

The kids have learned quite a bit of German from watching movies – just think of the fish and ocean words in “Finding Nemo” or the car and repair vocabulary in “Cars”. Plus the characters quite often use expression I would never use! Too funny when you hear your child express his frustration like a pirate! This brings me to an important point: Your child will only have the breadth of language that YOU speak – and your active vocabulary is much smaller that your passive one, especially when talking to a child! So make sure you expose your child to a broad variety of language – fairy tales, science books, TV, classic and modern children’s stories. And explain and rephrase often with your own words. In addition let them hear a variety of accents – books on tape read by actors or authors as well as family and friends from different parts of your country. These days, it is easier than ever to stay connected - we talk to grandparents and relatives on Skye, once a week on the phone and recently our oldest started typing emails in German to his Opapa! 

Finally, if your children start to find it tedious to communicate in your language, there is one thing that will get them asking in whatever language necessary: candy. Yes, it’s bribery, but in my house, gummibears have to be asked for in German! And in a friend’s house, where the children are in their teens and rarely still speak French, the afternoon snack is a special treat – French Madeleines or pastry and café au lait. While this is served, there are only French expressions of delight heard!

School age – realizing, most other families are monolingual!

While my children had realized that some of our friends spoke only one language with their parents, we lived a suburb of Chicago where we attended a Moms&Tots group with international families and I had organized a German play group. They regularly played with other children, who switched between German and English and visited other houses where the children addressed their parents in a different language (Greek and French). In the Montessori preschool, some Chinese and Russian children did not speak English in the beginning, but the children would always find a way of communicating, and French was taught by a native speaker.

It wasn’t until my oldest started Kindergarten at 5 (the equivalent of the UK Reception or the German Vorschule), that the majority of the children around him spoke English, and only English. It was that year, my oldest in Kindergarten and the younger one in preschool, when the kids picked English as their main language of communication amoung them. I fought if for a while, but it was a lost battle. It was already hard enough for them to come home and tell me what happened at school in German, when they experienced it in English. (This sort of translation work is a challenge even for adults!) So when they relaxed, reenacted and played, they switched to English, unless it was a German board game or I was playing with them. Now, 3 years later, English is basically the only language they speak to each other, while still addressing me in German. It pains me sometimes, but there is not much I can do without forcing them. I console myself with the fact, that when they visit my family in Germany, for a couple of weeks a year, German becomes dominant again.

With the fact that practically every other child in school speaks a certain language, which is also the language of instruction, the national language becomes overwhelming. Not only in simple vocabulary and exposure, but socially and emotionally. A big part of the children’s life will be in one specific language and carry with it feelings and impressions, that are untranslatable.

Sooner or later, there will come a time, when children want to be like their peers. Speaking something different will become “uncool”. At this point, you might have to decide between your children telling you their feelings in the other language, because they are easily accessible there, or having them struggle to tell you or tell you less translated into your language. It is not something I am looking forward to!

So far, in our house, we have reached the following compromise: When we have a dinner conversation about the day, we will jump between languages. Depending on which parent asks the question, the kids will answer in that language and if the other parent wants details, he/she will ask in their language. This gives me the chance to rephrase some things they have told their dad in English and ask for more information. It’s a constant back and forth and has caused quite some headaches for our guests (even or especially if they could speak both languages), but the kids are used to it by now. This of course is only possible, because my husband has learned enough German (first through a college class, then by simply listening and growing with the kids) to keep the conversation flowing.

A funny side effect from the strict division of me only speaking German and my husband only English has been that my oldest son now insists that I only speak German to him and complains, if I address him in English. This causes some difficulties, when I try to do homework with him. So he reads the math problem in English, but we talk about the solution and calculate in German and then he retranslates his answer into English to write it down. At least for English spelling sentences, there is no translation anymore – that was close to ridiculous in the beginning! (Though one advantage of being bilingual with spelling exercises is that similar sounding words - like “there”, “their” and “they’re” – are easy to tell apart, since they translate as completely different words). I am not sure whether this approach of homework is sustainable, most other bilingual families I know do their homework in the school language! But for now, we are sticking with our method (and reading homework is done with their dad in English every night).

At some point, you will also have to decide if & when you want to teach your children to read and write in the other language. For us, since German and English share an alphabet, it was not that hard. I imagine if you want to teach Russian, Greek, Arabic or especially idiomatic languages like Japanese or Chinese, the efforts must be enormous.

When I taught my oldest son to read German, we used the long summer holiday when he had turned 5. At the time we lived in the US and had 3 months to work with. We started with the alphabet - how some letters are pronounced differently - and then moved on to whole words. The next summer, we read beginners’ books, which I had ordered from Germany. For my second son, the process was a bit faster, since he could already read English and understood the concept of letter-sound-word contraction. But it also meant he made more mistakes but having the default English sound of a letter stuck in his head. This summer, we will move on to books with him.

If you can’t imagine teaching you child how to read at home, have a look on the internet. Many areas have foreign language schools, often coupled with a religion (for Greek or Arabic) or Saturday schools (Korean school in the US and Turkish school in Germany come to mind), or as a parents’ initiative!