Originally posted by Kathrine:

PS: Just out of curiosity, are you teaching Kamilla English just because it will be nice for her to know it, or is there a more personal reason like English-speaking family?
<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">The main reason is that it's easiest for children to learn it in a playful way from a young age. As I love English a lot and have spent 2 years living in England, we just said lets teach her from the start and give her sort of a bilingual education. So from the very first day I started to only speak in English to her, reading English stories, singing English nursery rhymes etc.

Although she might not necessarily reply in English, we do know she understands all of it and when she asked for the meaning of a specific word I will first explain it in English and as a last resort say the German word. Often she will give the translation herself before I even have the chance to start explaining. It's also very funny to see her use an 'English' word in the middle of a German sentence, like 'Mama, haben wir das schon gepayed?' (Mama, did we pay this already?) - yesterday she used one too the whole time and but I don't remember which one it was.

Kamilla has also attended a Kindergarten which had a bilingual group with one of her teachers being an native speaker. At the beginning she had problems with Tammie's American accent, but soon she was the one translating for the other children. Now in primary school they have one hour of English once a week, where she's also the one translating and helping the teacher.

We have this cute story when Kamilla was only 2. My BIL took her into Vienna - it was at Christmas - and they took the subway. While waiting at the station for the train, Kamilla was running in circles around my BIL counting up to 10 in German. A lady standing nearby commented how great it was that she could count already. Kamilla just looked at her, turned around running the other direction and counting up to 10 in English. My BIL said it was so funny to see the lady's face - her jaw just dropped.