For those of you who don't know, my daughter Eve is a mixologist of languages. She has 4.5 years of experience (give or take) mixing Hebrew and English, and she's not afraid to throw in new languages whenever she gets a chance.
I've been documenting her pearls of wisdom and have been sharing some of them on Facebook, but really they've become so common to the point where we find ourselves using her pearls regularly without even realizing we're doing so.
Kids are literal, like literally, and Eve is no different. She's a literal thinker and focuses on the EXACT meaning of words, often finding it difficult to interpret a less factual meaning. That's why hearing her speak Hebrew or Hebrish (mix of Hebrew and English) is on of the funniest things ever.
We've been raising our kids in a Hebrew speaking home, but can't ignore the reality in which they spend most of their days in an English speaking environment. They attend Canadian daycares and schools and most of their friends only speak English. This means that no matter how hard we 'work' on Hebrew implementation, the amount of hours they spend at home is relatively small. So English is their first language.
But other than wanting them to learn more than one language and have another shared language with them, the main reason we want them to at least speak Hebrew is because our families mostly speak Hebrew. My mom for example speaks 3 languages, but English is not one of them. So how is she to communicate with her over-the-ocean grandkids if they can't speak the same language? Speaking Hebrew became mandatory. But how do you do that?
At first it seemed like a challenge. Something that we needed to teach Eve. At some point in her early days we even made an unconscious decision to speak to her in English, thinking that it might be too confusing to add another language into her life at such an early phase, and thought that we would teach her Hebrew later.
Soon we learned that this was a mistake.
Kids are literal, but they're also sponges (so many qualities!), and even though we thought that she can only speak English and use a handful of Hebrew words here and there, when she turned 3.5 we learned that she can actually speak Hebrew (!!!) almost fluently. and we were shocked.
It was right after she and I had returned from one of our visits to Israel. During the 10 days that we spent there she only spoke English. People would speak Hebrew to her, but she would respond in English. But the second we landed back in Toronto, her Hebrew had raised its head. She squeezed every bit of Hebrew that was in this sponge, and this is when it started to be funny.
She would say things like "Yalla Ima let's go home", or "Weגענו", which is a mix of We in English and Arrived in Hebrew. But the majority of it is her being literal, trying to translate words and sentences directly from English to Hebrew, literally one word after the other, without thinking whether it makes sense in Hebrew or not. HILARIOUS.
Here are a few examples:
״אני מנסה להרדים את עצמי שלי״ ""את יודעת למה יש מלא flagים של קנדה? שכולם יידעו שזה קנדה!"
״אני יודעת את החנות הזאת!״
And the famous of them all:
"When I do פלוצים in the לילה I do big פלוצים"
And it doesn't stop at Hebrew. She now sings songs in French, she studies Spanish at school, and ever since she learned how to say "Bon Appetit" in Japanese (itadakimasu), she tells everyone that she can speak 5 languages. A sponge with no grip on reality :)
Raising bilingual kids has many benefits (and funny moments that will last forever), but there's one thing that nobody tells you about, and it is that there are no secrets around bilingual kids! We speak both languages and so does she (Tom will get there too soon enough).
Wanna say something so that she wouldn't understand? spell it. In Hebrew. Or learn another language. Which she'll eventually know as well, because, sponge.
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