My children are Afrikaans disabled

My children are Afrikaans disabled
20 May 2013

My poor children have a terrible Afrikaans handicap.  As in they don't speak it very well.  And their understanding thereof is rather limited too.  And thus, in effect, they are Afrikaans disabled.  No disrespect meant to fellow differently abled individuals out there.

What makes this so particularly bad, is the fact that their mother's (that would be me) mother tongue is actually Afrikaans.  It is true.  I have failed them.  Big time.  I know.

And somehow or other, despite agonizing feelings of guilt on my part, and various failed attempts to remedy the situation, their grasp of the language is not really growing.  Exponentially.  Or snail paced even.  Though, I do try.

For years we had the ideal and set the goal of certain days in our home being dedicated to "The Taal".  Yet we continually forgot.  As in every single time.  We were going to have Afrikaans days at least twice a week.  Alternatively, we’d have Afrikaans Tuesdays.  No, Afrikaans Thursdays.  An Afrikaans pet!  A truly inspired idea.  But the thing was that we were already in possession of several “English-speaking” pets.  And somehow communicating to our goldfish in Afrikaans was not very rewarding at all.  Particularly with the lack of two way communication.  And to be honest, I tried.  My self-confidence as a teacher to my children was at an all-time low.  I don’t even want to imagine how terrible that poor goldfish felt.  Because the feeling of failure was abysmal.

And so, my Mom gave me a truly ingenuous idea.  An idea, so particularly clever, so wise and so incredibly easy, we simply had to give it a bash.  And so this is what we do.  We speak Afrikaans in our car.  No, wait.  Before you laugh, give it a bit of thought.  That is A LOT OF TIME for Afrikaans at our disposal!  We live in the Strand, yet all of my kids go to school in Somerset West.  Their extra-murals are in Somerset West too.  We spend hours in the car every day.  Oh, not continually, I know.  But snatched snippets of time.  And once those snippets are thread together, the actual time spent, captive in a metal box, from which my kids are unable to escape, is rather large. 

It proved to be an unparalleled success.  We simply slotted into an Afrikaans zone, the second we entered the car.  Now this was in actual fact a dually beneficial system for me.  Because as my children’s Afrikaans is not all that great, and everyone ignored everyone else if they weren’t talking in Afrikaans, the senseless jibber-jabber in the car also decreased.  In fact bickering between siblings on the way to wherever we needed to go, dipped to an all-time low.  This was truly marvellous and a hugely unanticipated side benefit.  One I enjoyed greatly.  And so if Luke really wanted to tell Amber that she was lame, he would have to resort to, “Amber, jy is so kruppel”.  Terribly unsatisfying for him.  And in response, should Amber wish to say to Luke that he must stop being mean to her, she would have to say, “Luke, hou op om gemeen te wees met my”.  You catch my drift.  Their very lack of vocabulary, ended up being my friend.  Empowering me in a sense, to be able to drive conflict-free to any destination of my choosing with the kids in the car.

Still, it did not really help us in increasing their daily vocabulary.  Well, not by much.  Or perhaps that is not all that accurate either.  They certainly did pick up new words, but I’m not all that confident that it will be of benefit to them in conversational Afrikaans.  You know, should they have a discussion with someone else in Afrikaans. 

There is only so many applications of the word, “sitplekgordel” (seat belt), that one can throw into the average conversation.  And the same goes for, “straatlig” (street light) en “lamppaal” (lamp post).

And as for “stuurwiel” (steering wheel) and “ratkas” (gearbox)…..