English versus Spanish

At first our children could only speak Spanish and thought we did too. They learned a few English words because they had been told to - hello, good morning, thank you.

Then we arrived home and it hit Dayana one night, her mami spoke English with her friends and only English would be spoken in her new school. She didn't want to go but I encouraged her that her teacher knew some Spanish. Her teacher met her at the door the first day and said, "Hablo poco espanol" and Dayana was fine with school.

Johan meanwhile began preferring English words to Spanish words. I said his toy was "roto" and he asked, "It's broken?" - that's when I realized he was naturally learning English. Dayana was struggling to learn but Johan was naturally learning new words each day and making his own sentences. Tengo good idea he would say and then solve a problem (like how to make his Dora and Tigger stickers stick to my shirt as I left for work! Yes, that's a side story. The first time he said the sentence above was when he was giving me one of his stickers and I was glad that it had lost it's stickiness. He had a good idea and used another one to hold on mine - now I had two stickers on my shirt as I headed to drop him off at school and go to work).

I remember Dayana correcting Johan's English one day and I laughed because she made the same mistake a few minutes earlier.


Along about May, I noticed that Johan and Dayana were speaking English to each other. This was definitely a new step. And this was also about the time that Trevor and I quit learning any new Spanish because we no longer needed to. Our kids were learning and using English so quickly that Spanish was not the main language anymore. They were speaking about 50/50 but we knew the Spanish parts well enough that we no longer needed a dictionary or to study.

I will never forget one of the last Spanish words I learned...cosito. The word had stumped me from the first night when Johan wanted his cosito for bed and I finally found his car. The next night his cosito was a stuffed animal. For a while I thought the word meant little toy. But I could never quite figure it out. Trevor and I looked it up in the dictionary one night in Colombia but of course it wasn't in there. None of the critical words were. So for four months I tried to learn what cosito was when finally it hit me. Johan asked me to move the cosito and I moved a bunch of toys only to figure out he wanted me to move my computer screen. I remember turning to Trevor and saying, "It must mean thing because it is always used for something different!" Sure enough...COSITA is "little thing". Did you catch the spelling - our little ones had been pronoucing the word incorrectly too - no wonder we couldn't find it in the dictionary. A "cosa" is a thing. -ita means little. Anyway, back to the timeline.

At the doctor in early August and then at Walmart, random people spoke to our children in Spanish and they just stared at them. "What are they saying Mami?" Simple phrases like, "hola, como esta" were gone.

We went through the summer gaining words and sentences and thoughts in English. I estimate that we were at 80% English by the time school was to begin in the fall. Dayana was learning her letters in English too - a difficult task. Phonics is tough for her. One day early in the year with her tutor she was learning the short A sound. "I don't say it like that" she said. True, true, my child...you don't say it like thAUt.

During soccer season in late September or early October, when we were driving to take another tour of the "COOKE ROAD HILLS!", Johan said with some frustration..."I don't speak English Mami." It was his defense for not wanting to talk to people at soccer. But his self-refuting argument just made me giggle a bit. "Say something in Spanish Johan" - he just looked at me. "But I don't speak English!" ..."No son, you don't speak Spanish anymore." He was stunned.

A few days later he asked me why we speak English in Ohio? I almost went into a history lesson on the vote between English and German but I held back my dry humor.

Then a few weeks later he shouted out in the car as if a lightbulb had just come on..."MAMI, DAYANA IS SPEAKING ENGLISH!" Yes she is and so are you Johan. Your English is great and you have been speaking it for months!

What an amazing journey we have been on. But lest you think all confusion is now gone in our bilingual home...nearly all Spanish words are gone...but not all confusion. Johan recently told his teacher, "We speak English at school but Spanish at home."