Afrikaans homework

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As you might know, Marko is Afrikaans. Well, he was born and raised Afrikaans but he hardly ever speaks it anymore. All of his business stuff is in English, we only speak English at home. I think the only time he speaks Afrikaans is to his family (mother / father / sister etc). He prefers to speak in English. I once asked him what language he thought in and he said he didn't know. I think it is Afrikaans because if someone swerves in front of him in the traffic etc, he swears in Afrikaans ;) (Afrikaans is a much nicer language to swear in as it is so expressive. Fok sounds so much more mean than fuck).

However, as a result of all this English speaking, my children's Afrikaans in not very good at all! Which is a problem because unfortunately Afrikaans is a language they have to do at school. I say unfortunately because I would FAR rather my children do Xhosa as their second language than Afrikaans. Apparently the Xhosa starts in a few years time at school. Can't wait for them to learn how to speak Xhosa.

I blame Marko for the children's lack of mastery of Afrikaans as surely it should be his job to teach his children his mother tongue. Bad father, bad. Bad Afrikaaner. He is going to get excommunicated.

Aside: It is a strange but true phenomenon that here where I say (and it was the same when I was a child), when an Afrikaans child and an English child play together, they almost always default to English. Which is odd because English is actually a more difficult language to master than Afrikaans. Kate has an Afrikaans friend but they only ever speak English to each other.

Anyway, the twins have started with Afrikaans reading and writing. (Dear lord, we have only just mastered the very basics of reading and writing in English and now they start with Afrikaans!!)

Kate brought her Afrikaans workbook home for me to sign and I had a good giggle at this page.

For those who can't read Afrikaans, she wrote: "My mother's name is Tarty". Haha! An honest mistake to make.