Life in germany...what are your experiences?

[milibear]

Hi all!
Its almost a sure thing that i will be relocating to frankfurt, germany in the next couple of months. DH is german and i have a 2 month old dd.

I woke up in a cold sweat early in the morning in a total panic. Im normally an optimist but ive been having really negative thoughts about the move.

My main concerns are

1. learning the language - i am confident i could get to a decent level of fluency, but not enough to pursue my dream of being a speech and language therapist.
2. leaving the few close friends i have made in london behind ( im an ozzie)
3. possible racism towards me and my dtr( asian background)
4. the possibility i may never return to oz. the thought of not being with my family is killing me...

I have looked on toytown germany to read about how great life is in germany, but the posts seem tobe written by forces wives who dont necessarily want to or seem to have a career (i am NOT criticizing that at all). I am not the earth mother i thought i would be and the thought of being a hausfrau in germany makes me feel down. I know for the next two yrs i will be a sahm, but after that i was hoping to study at a london uni, but now...

Sorry to waffle- i dont even know what it is that i want to hear from german mners, but anything of your experiences/tips would be great. I am hoping that it is all these darn hormones/breastfeeding has something to do with my sour attitude to moving.

hello milibear,
am in cologne, have been here 4 years.
i think you are at a huge advantage having a german partner who can help you with the language, i'm sure once you get into the swing of being in germany and listening to it all the time, you can request his help. Will he talk to your daughter in german? listening to this will help alot i'm sure.

can you do any qualifications online/distance for SALT? or when your german is good, volunteer somehow in this area? to get a foot in the door?

i have to confess, i really miss london, but i think german society is somehow more family friendly, and maybe a safer place to bring up kids. we lived in peckham and i was a teacher nearby, i'm not sure this was where i wanted to bring up a family...

i worked here for 2 years, then had a tiny premature baby, was completely isolated for a while, those times were tough! But there are actually english speaking groups around if thats what you want, and i'm sure frankfurt has lots of ex-pats in the finance/business.

Don't know about potential rascism, but hope all goes well for the move. will family be able to visit? can you plan extended holidays to visit oz, especially in winter?

Hi milibear,

I'm not in Germany any more, but used to live in Mannheim - so not all that far from Frankfurt (which we used to visit for its huge M&S, sadly closed now!).

Like efeslight says, the fact that your partner is German will be a huge help. You'll also learn the language so much more quickly by being in the country itself.

I'm sure there's a big ex-pat community in Frankfurt and meeting other ex-pats can be a lifeline if you're feeling lonely (particularly if your German isn't all that fluent at the beginning). Having children also makes it far easier to meet people if you're not working (I didn't have a job when we first moved to Germany pre-DC and felt incredibly isolated until I started work).

I also missed London a lot (we lived there before we moved to Germany) but find that where we are now (Austria) is far more family friendly and can't imagine going back to live in London with DC now.

Come and join us on the Germany/Austria thread - there are one or two other MNers in Hessen IIRC.

Thanks, Efesight and Linzertorte for your advice.
DP will and does speak to DD in German, and I am very confident that I will pick up the basics of the language when I go to a language school.

Unfortunately, there are no distance courses for SLT in Europe, unlike the states.

I know that this move is definitely better for us in the short term, and I realise how much more family friendly the country is than London, unless you are a squillionaire, which we are not!

I have had my doom and gloom face on for the past couple of weeks, hence the late reply to your messages. But I am feeling more upbeat about it all, and I hope to find some expats in the city that I click with.

I will check out the thread you recommended. Who knows, I might be raving about how lovely it is in germany in a few months?

I have lived near/in Frankfurt for the last 15 years. I too have a German husband and my children are now bilingual. I have found it a great place to live with a thriving ex-pat community. There are very active (US, GB etc.)women's clubs which are great when you arrive and have lots of events for mothers and kids; also loads of professional ex-pats who are here for work and meet regularly. We have an Australian nanny so let me know when you get here if you need a dose of Oz!

Hi milibear,

I live near Frankfurt (will be 2 years in April), have a German DH, DS is 2 months old & I also have no intention of becoming a Hausfrau! (I'm not Ozzie though) :)

I don't know Frankfurt itself too well but know the area & am happy to help with any specifics from my vantage point on the sofa with a constantly feeding baby.

Like Linzer said, come and join the Germany/Austria thread & feel free to PM me if you want/need to.

Hi Milibear - I'm near Essen - and we've been here for 3 1/2yrs. I'm a big fan of toytown - if you ignore the yanks there's not too many military types on it - mainly the sort of expat you'd expect - straight talking and taking no prisoners!!

FFM is a great place to go - very cosmopolitain and international, and v expensive as a result, but I'm sure you'll find yourself at home really quickly. My language skills aren't as good as I'd like - I can get by day to day but need to work hard to take it to the next level!

My advice - on the language front - DON'T get english language TV -we made this mistake before and my skills plummeted! Try to speak/listen to as much german as you can and don't worry about just going for it. The germans love to speak english so you'll have to say that you MUST speak german - they can speak what they like - it's a bit odd to begin with but muddle on through!

If you want to work as a speech therapist - check that your qualifications work here - the germans are very hot on having the right certification. You may find that you'd be better off teaching english - although from my experience so far every child under 6 seems to get speech therapy prescribed by their docs so you may find something!!

Germany is a great place to bring up children, the way of life and work/life balance etc seems so much better than in the uk. Enjoy living here and the german cultre.

Pm me if I can be of any more help!

CEDP, Lateralligator and doradoo: Thank you so much for your advice and willingness to help a stranger!

We will be there in Jan, so beware you may be PMd and stalked by me then!
:o

I will take your advice on not getting any english telly- as tempting as it is-
but I do wonder, how on earth do you get the kids to be bilingual when they go to kindergarten and they speak german all day long? My big fear is that DD will understand me in english but wont speak to me in it.

Hi Milibear

I am in Bavaria and am a Hausfrau (haha) so didn't reply earlier - my kids are 6, 4 and 6 months and I'm married to a German. Where we live in the Bavarian countryside there are not many working mums in a full time career sense (I do a bit of English teaching in the eves and used to do one day a week before DC3, but that barely counts), but I think it is very different in Frankfurt so won't address that side of things!

Maybe you could offer speech therapy in English as you will be based in a city with lots of ex-pats about - I have seen posts on Toy Town asking for recommendations for that so there may be a market (but I only look at Toy Town Munich).

You can ensure your dd is fully bilingual but you absolutely must always, always, always speak to her in English, including in front of non English speaking people (some mums say they feel rude, but tbh why does anyone else need to know what you are saying to your child, plus most people understand English to some degree anyway). Also as she gets older (from 2 I'd say, depending how she develops speech wise) insist she replies in English if she wants a response from you - the same way you wouldn't give her a snack until she says please, it can be perfectly natural to say "In English?" instead/ as well as "what do you say?... please..." :)

My dd was 19 months when we moved here and has had no problems at all with her German whatsoever, the KiGa teacher who took over her group after she'd been there a year said she couldn't tell she was bilingual at all until she heard her speak to me, and was amazed at how she switches languages. She started school in Sept and is currently doing very well with no suggestion she will need extra help at any point, though you never know of course. Her English is also totally native speaker though - if you met her in the UK you would never guess she also spoke German.

DS1 who is 4 was born here and does drop odd bits of German into his English - the one annoying me atm is "bei" - "Last week I was bei my friend Paul..." when he means with someone or at their house... but it is a minor thing which will hopefully iron out soon! I have been told that his German is ahead of some of the boys he is friends with who are his age who only speak German (well and Bavarian dialect - that could be the problem!), although he also drops the odd English word in - but then so do some Germans!

We speak English at home even though DH is German, we made a decision to keep it as our family language, and we do have English TV :) It is really important to me my kids speak proper English as well as German, as I too heard too many mums who say their kids don't/ won't speak English, and met a couple of American/ German families in which the kids of 6, 7, 8 years old speak really strange English - American accent obviously, but German grammar/ word order and some German vocab! This seems to me a terrible shame when one parent is a native speaker!

I taught DD to read in English, I read bedtime stories to all the kids in English (DH reads in German but only once a week, we possibly need more of a balance) - it is important to me they are bi-literate not only bi-lingual, and I think as thy get older they need to read equally happily in English to keep expanding their passive vocabulary etc. otherwise they are not truely bi-lingual, but German speakers who speak fluent English - which is a great thing in itself, but there is no reason a child like yours should not be truly bi-lingual with no concious effort on her part, just a bit on yours :)

Good luck with your plans!

Oh - on the Asian background I have a Vietnamese friend married to a German, with the most gorgeous 2 year old girl, and she has not mentioned any racism and always says how nice her neighbours are etc. - I will try to find a way to ask, but we have to speak German to each other and neither of us is fluent so I always have to think through anything that might come across wrong! People are more blunt here than in the UK and tend to just say things without thinking they will cause offence - my DH is half Croatian and the kids are relatively dark skinned, in a Mediterranean way, and people always observe that my baby is dark and seem to think this is absolutely an acceptable thing to say - it is fine with me but I am not sure if people in the UK would say it for fear it is not a politically correct comment...

Hi milibear, I've lived in Germany for 20 years now, although Berlin is a very different kettle of fish to Frankfurt.

About your points:

1. language: I went from virtually no German to passing the kleines Sprachdiplom (run by Goethe Institut) in less than two years. I think it's equivalent to A-Level. I did some formal lessons at the Volkshochschule (Adult Education Centre) but not that much during that time, and was teaching English to make money so it wasn't total immersion. Yes, it's unlikely you will learn enough German to do speech therapy with German kids, but in a city as big as Frankfurt there will be a need for English-speaking therapists. My DD1 has needed speech therapy twice and did it both times in English with bilingual therapists - it was really important because one of the problems was with pronouncing 'th', which a German therapist would not cover. But doradoo is right that getting qualifications recognised in Germany can sometimes be a real struggle. Yes, there's a bit of a language conflict between wanting to immerse yourself in German to learn the language yourself, but at the same time wanting to maintain English as a minority language for you and your DS. I would suggest you learn as much of the language as possible over the next year, before you have to start making decisions about monolingual or bilingual nurseries/schools. My thought is that you SHOULD take advantage of any bilingual education on offer if you want your DS to be a real English native speaker. Frankfurt International School is supposed to be good, but I don't know anyone who's been there.
2. Leaving friends: in an age of Skype and EasyJet that's not really a problem. You can book a cheap flight back to London for a weekend every so often, or they can come to visit you. It's a more intense kind of relationship then, but it can still work for years. But it is important to make new friends in Germany, and that includeds German friends. Perhaps a mother-and-baby group? Your DS wouldn't be too old for the dreaded but achingly fashionable PEKIP group (which is like an NCT group but with naked babies).
3. Racism: in a city like Frankfurt that's not going to be an issue. The only place you might encounter some less civilised attitudes is the rural areas of ex-East Germany, but the people there are rude about everybody, including West Germans. 4)Not returning to Oz - can't help you there, except to say that you can't know now how things will pan out in 10 years. International families tend to be highly mobile (another advantage of international schools, in a way) and I know a number of families who have emigrated to Oz after many years in Berlin, and in one case they spent 4 years back in Oz and then moved back to Germany because they missed it so much!

Germany is in many ways a healthier place to bring up children than the UK - I find German children more mature in a positive way because they are encouraged to be independent and make sensible choices at an early age (in the UK it seems that many children are given no freedom at all until they become teenagers and they then act badly because they can't deal with that level of independence). Sorry, my personal rant.

And I find Toytown a bit weird and aggressive, personally. The Berlin forum is full of young singles saying 'Um I don't speak German but I want to live and work here, what can I do?' and then a pile of arrogant answers from people who went through exactly the same process ten years ago but don't want anyone else to succeed in it.

Best of luck with the move!

Re the language, I agree with 5more that you have to be consistent and always speak to your children in English. I've never had any problems getting mine to speak English, although DS (the youngest) does forget occasionally and will come out with a German sentence, particularly if he's playing with friends. Almost inevitably, their German vocabularly is better than their English so they sometimes use German words in English sentences - I'll either ask them what the word is in English or will repeat the sentence with the correct English word (confirming what they've said rather than obviously correcting them, though).

Watching German TV is a great way of learning the language, but I must admit I couldn't do without my fix of British TV - and I also think it's good for the DC to hear English from someone other than me. They only ever used to watch English DVDs and they pick up a surprising amount from them; if I hear them using a phrase that hasn't come from me, I can be pretty sure it's from CBeebies! I also read in English to them every day and encourage them to read books in English too, although DD2 is keener to do so than DD1 (and as a result, her written English is far better).

Hi, I've lived in Germany for ten years and wanted to share my experiences regarding racism. I studied in Thuringia, which was in the GDR, and am good friends with lots of Japanese and South American students and also taught with English alongside black and Filipino colleagues.

My black colleagues occasionally had racist remarks directed at them. One American guy was confronted rather menacingly at a train station in some economically-deprived part of the countryside (he pulled out some sharp, weapon-like thing he had tucked in his belt and started shouting at the idiots like a crazed lunatic and they fled .

I also experienced being shouted at by a couple of drunk young men while out on a Saturday night with a group of female Japanese friends. It wasn't pleasant, but it wasn't entirely clear exactly what they'd said due to the drunken slurring, anyway.

Otherwise, none of my friends have told me about any racism they have encountered. I would expect Frankfurt to be much more cosmopolitan anyway than the towns I've lived in.

Btw, I made several very good friends through going to PEKiP classes!

Sorry, I just saw Tenebrist has already mentioned that encountering racism is much less likely in a big city like Frankfurt than in rural eastern Germany, and much more succinctly .

The point I wanted to make was that, even here in rural ex-GDR, you are unlikely to have problems if you avoid certain situations, such as town centres on Saturday night, which you might well do anyway.

5moreminutes thank you for your advice re: language. I will certainly do as you do.

tenebrist thank you for your advice on all the points! It is reassuring to know that this move will be for the better.

My plans are to go tothe goethe and do the superintensive two week course, and then do evevning courses later.

Silken ladder, i hope you are right. Frankfurt does seem multicultural.

A good friend has just spent 4 months in Frankfurt and had a wonderful time. I will get her to tell me some specifics and will return!

Thank you 33goingon64. love your name, btw - thats exactly how im feeling. the big 3 0 is less than a week away!!

Dear Milibear,
Frankfurt is very international and a great place to be based. You can sign on for the language courses for 'foreigners' - a New Zealand women who I met a few years ago managed to achieve a very high level of competence within about 6 months. Check out this website: www.newcomers-network.de and come to some of the events. There is some kind of festival on in mid september. The university I work at also teaches Speech therapy - we are based in Idstein, near Frankfurt and also there are some courses in Frankfurt, too - www.hs-fresenius.de (click onto the English version - it is a small EN at the top!).
btw - I have lived here for 32 years - all my daughters are completely bi-and multi-lingual - I managed to study/work and further my career despite all the stereotyping shown on the TV programme - and I certainly think that I have a much better quality of life than most of my friends in the UK! Go to some nice mother & child groups and you will surely meet some really nice people (and ignore all the others!).
Enjoy being a young mother - get involved and integrated and I am sure you will have a fantastic experience. But don't expect it all to fit into place for at least 3-6 months - give it and yourself some time.