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Showing posts with the label English

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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Majority language mistakes - don't teach, educate!

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We do not speak with our children in the majority language but this does not mean we do not educate them about correct use and grammar of the majority language . They say that to achieve multilingualism you do not teach your child the minority language as such. You just need to make sure the kid has enough exposure to the language. But with majority language if I do provide the exposure  (or your situation does it itself) and child is not picking exactly the right influences, I do think that it is my place to educate our kids about the correct way of using the majority language. When I hear my child using really bad grammar in the majority language ( English in our case), I do step in and correct the child. And this is how we do it: The instruction or explanation of the mistake and correct use is done as far as reasonably possible in the minority language and the correct phrase is presented in the majority language. ( e.g English).  Example of this: Lit...
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Siblings' language: The fight with the killer language continues...

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Just to recap - in our family we speak THREE languages on daily basis. LingoPapa speaks Urdu with kids, LingoMama in Czech and language of the community is English. ( Parents also speak mostly English with each other). We have successfully established communication channels with the children in the desired languages. This means kiddos only speak to me in my minority language and different minority language with their father. But what started to happen as the children grow .... killer language crept in!!! We noticed that when out of earshot, LittleLingo (4 years old at the time of writing) speaks to his little brother in English (majority language). Sometimes, we had a bizarre feeling when we heard two two "English" kids playing in the living room. I mean who are these people? Right. As we live in English speaking country, LingoPapa and I concurred that we might want to encourage minority languages at home. The reasons for this are: 1) We would like the kids to learn...
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Sport a new language

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Many people want to introduce their children to another language.  You can of course pass on a language that you already speak and you can also start to learn a language with your child. I would like to share how we managed to get our 4 year old interested in Japanese language. In actual fact, it was LittleLingo who initiated this Japanese adventure. He became fascinated with Ninja Turtles after I showed him some 80s cartoons dubbed into Czech. The fascination with karate grew and the questions started to flow... I went to Japan myself many many years ago and I was lucky to explore the country with a friend that lived in Japan at the time and spoke Japanese. So I was delighted by LittleLingo's interest. Apart form odd vocab and ability to recognise the script, I am in noway a person that could teach Japanese to our child.   We found a karate club that was teaching karate in Japanese. Bingo! LittleLingo now attends once to twice a week. It is bizarre how quick chi...
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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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Be a proud oddball! The biggest and most common block to multilingual upbringing

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I already wrote about the "killer language" and the need to get the right ammunition to fight it. However, before we start speaking the "ammo and conquest", there is a really important aspect of multilingual parenting/upbringing that needs to be discussed. Hand on heart, I can say that this aspect has been coming up time and time again when I have met other people attempting the whole multilingual family business. So I feel this needs to be highlighted. Most of the time the parents and carers who plan or already do try to bring up the kids with another language(s) admit that they are: a) not confident, b) shy, or c) feeling that they stick out/draw attention to themselves, or d) ashamed  ...to speak to the child in minority language in public. Well, let me tell you, if you feel any of the emotions listed above when speaking in public in your language (most of the time minority one), YOU do have a problem.  This is because, your child will fee...
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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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