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Showing posts with the label Czech

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 ba...
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Church and white slippers - how a 4 year old decodes his languages

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What does a church and a pair of white slippers have in common? Hmmm, let me see... I did not know that they do but they actually do :) Today Little Lingo while riding his bike asked - 'Mami??? What is a chapel?' We just walked past the Salvation Army building so I turned to him and said: "Well, in English chapel is a part of a church building... and in Urdu "chapl" چپل  means a slipper". Little Lingo seemed satisfied with the answer and cycled on. After a while he rode back to me and said: 'So mami, it means that I was born in White Slipper?' ( He actually said it in his 3rd language which is Czech - "Bílý pantofel") And I had to agree; 'Yes indeed, Little Lingo, you were born in White Slipper/ Bílý Pantofel...yes, because you were born in Whitechapel hospital in East London.' And this is actually only one example. I have noticed that our children that we try to raise with more languages actually show the ability to d...
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GUEST POST: "My struggle to use the minority language in public"

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💥 GUEST POST 💥 GUEST POST 💥   LingoLiving is delighted to publish our first GUEST POST from one of our readers. This mum shares her candid story and personal reasons for having difficulty to speak in the minority(i.e. foreign) language with her child in public. She includes a brilliant tip on how to overcome this inhibition.  ****************************************************************************** I’m a Czech mum of a 2 year old M., married to an Englishman, living in England. Before M. was born I KNEW I wanted her to talk both languages, have the ability to communicate both Czech and English, I KNEW I wanted her to be able to have a chat with her Czech relatives but what I didn’t know how hard it was! I find it difficult to learn new languages and after living in England for almost 2 decades I still make basic mistakes, I don’t like my accent and I get frustrated when people don’t understand me. So that doesn’t help my confidence. M. and her Cz...
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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. Remem...
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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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