Hungarian shoes.

My son surprised us this morning, as he was putting his shoes on. He suddenly turned to us and said "Adam, cipő"
(Adam is my father, and Hungarian for shoe is "cipő.")
His input in Hungarian is so minimal, that I wasn't expecting any Hungarian to really register with him at all, but he is clearly picking up some words. Kids are amazing!

He is now using more and more English with my English speaking friends, and Russian words with his dad (inserted into otherwise German two/three word utterances).
"da unten shina" (over there car german/Russian)
Or "train spielen" (train play)

So even though he isn't "speaking" English or Russian, he is inserting appropriate nouns (and some verbs) in the correct contexts. We also found that he repeats words and short utterances in English and Russian a lot more now. It's as if he is suddenly getting active in these two languages.
His first Russian construction was last week, he was looking for his toy rabbit's boat and said "zaichik lotka net" (rabbit boat neg)

So the effort of making sure he is getting input in these three language is proving really worth it now! I know it is hard for a lot of parents who are speaking a minority language to their child when their child is not responding in this language.
But I urge everyone to relax about this. Active production is the very final stage of language acquisition. And when it starts to happen, it's amazing!

And no doubt, there will be phases where he will not want to speak one of his languages anymore. But as long as these languages are around, they remain accessible. My philosophy is that everyone should be allowed to choose whichever language they are most comfortable using. And then we'll see what happens...

Meanwhile I'd better hurry up with my Russian studies, as my son is about to overtake me!

rabbits, pillows and broken O's

My son is very aware of who uses what words, and he's usually pretty good at saying what "Mama/Papa/Lili" says, and
when I ask him what he himself says, he usually picks the German word.

Recently though he has decided, for example, that he says "rabbit" and not "Hase" like Mama and "book" not "Buch"
So English is definitely starting to arrive in our house!

He also stubbornly uses the word "sofa" for "pillow", and he knows that it's called a "Kissen" but he insists that his word for it is "Sofa."
I wonder if he knows he is the only one that does this?

We've been busy, so I haven't had much time to write any posts, but I'll leave you with a short funny anecdote (which is actually not bilingualism related)

The other day, he pointed at a "C" and said "O put" (meaning "O kaputt" i.e. a broken O) and asked me to fix it.