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 habit of using "Urdish" - mixing English words into Urdu similarly to Spanglish. 


To the rescue!


What are we trying to do? Well, at this point MiniLingo is just 3 and tutor would not work. We plan to hire a tutor when Mini can sit longer to help me and the kids with Urdu reading, writing and grammar. So the idea came about how to improve kids and mine Urdu and how to help LingoPapa with teaching us. We came up with what we call "Urdu Itvar" (اتواراردو) which translates as "Urdu Sunday". 


Urdu Sunday

On Urdu Sunday when we tend to be all together as a family and we decided we all need to more and better speak Urdu. It is me who struggles and LingoKids laugh at me. But it seems to be working. They correct me and I correct LingoPapa's Urdish and we refer to classical Urdu dictionary. It is fun. This Sunday we tried and I learn couple new words. 


And it is also a brilliant way to get out of arguments :) It is difficult to bother to argue with limited grammar and vocab. 


Would you give this a go? 

Comments

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5 April 2019 at 21:51
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