Bilingual dd translating to other language a bit

[pillowcase]

Hi,
my dd1 is 8 and speaks English and French both very well, although we moved to France when she was 4 so her schooling has all been through French and her French is probably stronger than her English at this stage, well 'written' anyway. She does favour English at home when playing with her siblings though, so I would say her spoken lang is about equal.

She's beginning to let French interfere more and more though. She says 'at the place of' instead of 'instead' (au lieu de). She says 'we are 10 in our class' instead of 'there are 10...' (nous sommes) and so on. Of course her brother and sister hear these expressions and pick them up so they've become normal expressions now and are grating on my ear!!!

What should I do? If I correct them they take the correction but get it wrong the next time. Is it normal that even truely bilingual people say things in a 'funny' way sometimes?

BTw they have very little daily contact with English apart from with me, so is it always going to be a struggle?

As far as I know this is very common and normal, she is working with different sentence structure rules and it is very easy to confuse the rules for each. Just keep modeling the correct english version for her. It sounds like she is thriving in both languages, what lucky children to have access to a language rich upbringing.

This blog is great for first hand experience of these idiosyncracies.

thanks yawningmonster,
yes they are all so lucky, i wish I spoke French as well as them! So is it common and normal, and they'll grow out of it with more reinforcing, and perhaps more contact with Eng speakers?

oh thanks accidentalmum, will check that out

ok, i've been reading that blog and another linked to it but they all seem to be talking about younger kids who haven't yet managed to put the language together and are doing a lot of mixing. (Aside: I love when they do that it's so cute, or even cuter when they didn't know a word in French so they just used and English word and said it with a French accent)

My kids I would say have gone beyong that and HAD a great grasp, did speak properly for some time. But now they seem to be regressing in English.

Sorry, for some reason I read that your DD was 4.

I can't help but think that English will never be a problem, given the overwhelming media, cultural influnces.

My two do this - they speak English and German and come out with some very, ahem, interesting translations of German phrases. They are 4 and 6.

tbh I take the view that it'll all come out in the wash. Eventually they'll get formal English teaching within the German school system which will hopefully reinforce the correct way to speak and at present I just back it up by gentle correction myself. I don't fret about it personally, at this age it's such a massive learning curve and if as you say, one language is becoming more dominant small confusions are bound to occur. fwiw dh (german) has an English friend who grew up in Germany with English spoken at home. She speaks English like an English person. The only problems she had were at 18 when she went to uni in England and wasn't quite up to speed on idiom - but she picked it up pretty quickly.

She will get through it, especially major things like that. The only things I find my fully bilingual French/English OH has trouble with are prepositions which are only slightly incorrect. Being married "with someone" rather than "to someone" (je suis mariée avec quelqu'un) being a particularly good example of that, but you really have to be pedantic and listening out to pick that kind of stuff up.

update:

played a game with them tonight, me saying something incorrectly and seeing if they could fix it. Most of the time they could. Most importantly I found that there weren't even that many example I could think of, so it isn't a big problem. Thanks for all your input anyway, nice to get other perspectives.

Where are you pillowcase?

When we first moved to France I wasn't that fussed about meeting other native English speakers but since DCs were born we have met a few children who have English at home and French at school and the time we enjoy together speaking English are useful as well as fun.