She went to a German kindergarten since it is more important that she learns German and that worked very well. She'll be attending a German school, so it was really essential that she master German. She has contact to Russian children of course but like most children who are non-native speakers of German, they prefer to communicate with each other in German since that is the language of their daily life and I think that is a fairly natural development. Russian parents have great difficulty getting their children to keep up Russian once they're out of the purely Russian home environment and attending kindergarten or school. Russian doesn't have high status here which may be part of the reason for that. There were also a couple of aspects of the way the Russian kindergartens I visited were run which made them unacceptable to me personally - but then that's another story. I never seriously considered them an option for us.

I think I have made the best arrangements for us under our circumstances and I'm happy with that. I just find it a pity that there is practically no organised Russian teaching for non-Russian speaking children here. In contrast, we have excellent teaching facilities for preschool learners of many other languages, including Mandarin and Japanese.