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Showing posts from March, 2018

One day - One language

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How to increase a minority language exposure It is inevitable that in any multi-lingual family setting one or more languages get more time and focus than the others. Naturally one of the parents or any other adult speaking minority language just gets to spend more time with the kids. Whether a stay at home parent, caregiver or maybe the one that spends a long morning commute with the child. Or there is more relatives around speaking the language. Or simply the adult responsible for passing on the minority language is just not as comfortable with it, gets limited time, cannot naturally hold conversation with a young child or simply gets frustrated to be in it alone.  As the time progresses and LingoPapa works hard away from home to support us, he gets limited time to speak and actively teach children Urdu. It a language that needs more attention in our household. Not only we get the least exposure to it but it also needs more attention due to its Persian script and bad ha
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Majority Language Trap

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In the context of  multilingual setting the "majority language" is usually the language spoken by great majority of people around us. Sometimes such language can be described as a "dominant language" .  Having worked with LittleLingo for past 4 years and MiniLingo for 2 years, I can understand why a majority language is also referred to as the "killer language" . I can confirm that even if you put a maximum effort into speaking to a child from birth in non-majority language, the killer one will creep in. Especially, if you live a well adjusted life in the majority language community such as visiting playgroups, children activities, sports clubs, watch TV and interact with other majority language speakers. In our case, what is even worse is the fact that  PapaLingo and I speak "the killer" to each other at home. But not to worry, there are tried and tested ways to beat the "killer"! ************************************************
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The "WHY" volume II. - Teaching kids a foreign language that is not your mother tongue

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In the previous post I spoke about passing on a mother tongue. But what about teaching another foreign language to a child? I say: ""Why not"? 💪. From own experience I can say that  children are very receptive if they are spoken to by an adult ( be it a parent, educator ...) in a foreign language and make a remarkable progress. I can give an example - our son has been treated by a Chinese doctor who has limited command of English. Once LittleLingo learnt how to greet the doctor in Chinese and saw the positive reaction, he was hooked. LittleLingo anf MiniLingo really enjoy a good foreign language read :)  As per the reasons why parents should consider teaching a foreign language to a child, here are some of ours: 1) Developing passion for languages That is a good thing, right? Show them how it works, make it natural for them. 2) Passing on a life skill Can you speak a conversational Spanish? Do you treasure such skill? Why don't you pass it on
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The "WHY" volume I. Our reasons to teach our kids our mother tongues

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This post is purely focusing on reasons why we decided to pass our mother tongues ( yes plural because husband and I have entirely different mother tongue) to our children. Czech countryside  Many people may have many other reason why to do so. In no particular order of importance, here are our answers to the "WHY": 1) Authenticity of communication with our off springs To us we will never speak our second or third language as well as our mother tongue, even though we are pretty good. Also all those little expressions and jokes...right? 2) Passing on the cultural heritage Lots of the culture we grew up in is locked in language. Some things you just cannot translate. LingoPapa uses many Urdu proverbs to illustrate a point for example. 3) Passing on a skill for life Being able to use another language and think in it is an invaluable skill and asset. Even if you think your language is too small or not wide spoken. 4) Brain development It is proven th
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The "WHAT" ...mother tongue, father tongue or language?

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When deciding for multilingual upbringing  for your kids, it is important to clarify for yourself what you want to teach them. Your conscious intention is crucial to the success. From the very beginning we knew we want them to learn our respective mother tongues (Urdu and Czech). Living in a country that is English speaking we knew this is not going to be an easy task considering we do not have extended family here. Kid's multilingual library items We searched for a strategy that would work for us the best. We unanimously settled on One Person One Language (OPOL) approach. There will be a separate blog post on this and links to other strategies later on. We also decided later on that we want to teach them some of the languages we speak other than our mother tongues and possibly learn a new one with them. We are currently working on French and Arabic by speaking  and exposing these to them. Watch out for posts on how we do that and what is the success. Remember,
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It's a state of mind

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I get asked this a lot : "When have you started to teach languages to your children?" "What is the right time to start?" In my humble opinion, one has to make the intention to raise kids with more than one language way before they arrive. It is really helpful if you consider how you going to raise your children and whether passing on another language is important not only to you but also the other co-parent.  Switching languages on daily basis, potentially learning a new one as an adult and coping with the stress of arrival or a baby, toddler tantrums and tween drama...and beyond...is NOT EASY !  I moved abroad to improve my English after high school and around that time I started to ponder on how I will teach languages to my future kids. As years went by I never went back to settle in my home country. What is more, I move to another country and picked up another language. In France I worked in multilingual family where kids spoke Spanish with th
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So what we cooking? Here is our recipe..

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Albanian bean soup ... We have a pretty interesting mix in our household. We currently live in an English speaking country so English is the majority language all around us. And for this reason we don't teach it to our children....well ...more on this later... Next ingredient - a delightful Slavic language - CZECH . Czech is my mother tongue and as a mother I am keen to pass it to my kids. For many reasons...more on this later Next ingredient - one of the most poetic indo-european languages - URDU . The children's father is native Urdu speaker and is actively making sure he does his best to teach this language to our children. For many reasons...more on that later.  Next ingredient - Arabic ...more on that later. So this is the basic layout of our language collage. What is your mix? 
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Welcome to our "lingoliving" life

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This blog is dedicated to multilingual parenting, languages study, language teaching and all things related. It will not be just about our experience from attempting to teach our kids languages but also about adult and continuous language learning.  Why? Well, finally I gathered the courage to speak about our results and battles and discoveries when it comes to multilingual and multicultural parenting and having third (or perhaps fourth :) ) culture children.  I would like to also supplement this blog by videos and other interactive content and also connect with others on similar path!  Thanks for stopping by ....more content soon :)
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