It isn't actually lying.
I like to listen to language acquisition podcasts and read about learning languages. I know, I am totes fun! I only speak 2 languages and one of those incredibly quickly and one with a laissez faire approach to finessing the details. People who speak multiple languages fascinate me. I think that it is absolute envy to be honest. I hate not being able to communicate and know what is going on. As a kid in Australia in the suburbs from a 7th generation Anglo Saxon family on both sides there was very little experience of other languages and I didn't start learning German until I was 26. Actually, to expand on that I didn't get a passport and travel to another country until I was 27. Australia is big and airfares were really expensive in the 70s, and 80s so it wasn't until I had finished uni and saved up that I went overseas for the first time. So, you can see that the need to learn another language was a low priority.
But I digress. I recently heard a posdcast about lying in another language. It was not about sinister lying but lying about time or sequence of events because you don't have the vocabulary or past, present, future tense ability necessary to explain it properly or it would just take too long and sound ridiculous.
In a post about lying I think I also need to state, for the record the following .
I find it really hard to tell lies. I have never been good at it and hate doing it, so therefore I don't.
When I reported my wallet stolen I completely understood the sentence about telling the truth and I had even written it down so as to get the order of events and tense right.
What I do sometimes do when speaking German in those quick interactions with people you don't know but have met at the playground or in a shop is, gloss over things for ease of conversation. This is not easy to do with kids.
Case in point occured a few weeks ago when we were at a playground. This playground is hard to find as it is down a path but I remembered it from when the kids were really small and the Mouse had gone there with school once. So long story short (that is the other thing you might have noticed, my stories are long) we found it again and the Monkey pointed out a newish sign as we entered and we talked about the sign. There was a grandmother at the park with a 1-2 year old and we struck up a conversation about the park being hard to find. I agreed, she mentioned the sign and I feint surprise and enquired where it was as this was easier then saying we had seen it (see all that past tense). At this point the Monkey loudly chipped in that we had not only seen it but had talked about it. There was no coming back from this glossing over of the facts. All I could do was suddenly feint remembering it. I then decided to improve my sequencing and stop 'lying', at least when the kids could correct me.
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