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Showing posts with the label French

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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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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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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