Another example is, A: “Hey Steve, are you going to announce something cool at WWDC?”, B: “No, I’m not so i can dissapoint all our developers and send our stock nose-diving… (meaning, of course i will announce something insanely great!)… If you translate that dialogue into Chinese, the response made by B will likely not be understood…

Following your (and your sister’s) language development when you were little was fascinating. Although you learnt single words quite early, you were otherwise rather a slow speaker, and did not start to form proper sentences until about age 3+. In the meantime it was as if you just wanted to watch and listen until you could get it clear in your head which language belonged to whom, and then there was no stopping you (and this has been the general trend ever since! :-) ). Once you started talking, you would speak English to your dad and his visiting friends, and Norwegian to me and my visiting friends and relatives. However, an interesting phenomenon developed, which lasted a good ways into Kindergarten. When speaking Norwegian, you would take English nouns, and also verbs, and add Norwegian endings to them – like “jeg tørket hånden på towel’en” or “jeg jump’et ned fra rock’en” etc. On occasion, the same thing would happen when you spoke English; you would use the English language in the sentence, but still add Norwegian endings – in the case of the verbs, this happened both in the infinitive, past and present tense ” I dried my hands on the towel’en”, “I jump’et down from the rock’en”, “I hurt my head on the stairs’en” or – “jeg jump’er ned fra rock’en” and “if I jump’er ned stairs’en, vil jeg hurt’e my head” etc.

Up until preschool age, I always thought this was unique to you and our family, but when you started pre-school, which also had other children with American fathers and/or mothers, with the other parent being Norwegian, I discovered to my astonishment that they too spoke exactly the same way, and more often than not it would occur only with specific words, this being the exact same words that you had problems with.

Not only that, since we moved to the U.S., I’ve noticed the same thing with older, Norwegian children who live here in Bartlesville for 2-3 years. By the time they’re ready to move back to Norway, they use English verbs and nouns with Norwegian endings when they try to carry on a conversation in Norwegian. In a few amusing cases, this has resulted in some rather obscene (how do you spell that again?) words, which have necessitated a quick and stern correction from the mother (I won’t give examples of those here).

mom