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Showing posts with the label bilingual child

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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Dip in & keep it fresh - siblings' language strategy

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Very often siblings end up speaking with each other in the majority language. We have had that issue too. And yes it may come back in the future but at the moment our children don't speak in majority language together. Yay! ( Albeit might be temporary.) In previous post I described how we managed to set one of the minority languages spoken (Czech) in our home as a language of communication between our children. Well, now we work on the second minority language spoken at home to become a more spoken language between them. Ideally, when LingoPapa is at home, they should be able to switch from mother minority language to father minority language.  So what helped us at this stage? LittleLingo (4 years) went to Pakistan for nearly 2 weeks just with LingoPapa ( Urdu speaker). Luckily family situation back in the fatherland required LingoPapa's presence and he and the kid could travel.  While there -  no English was allowed and LittleLingo spent all time with the fam...
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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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Child refuses to speak in minority/native language

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I often hear that child refuses to speak minority or parent's/grandparent's native language in public (more on this later).  However, I also came across instances when the child refuses to speak the minority language altogether. I get many people praising how our oldest is capable to switch into three different languages. His younger brother is too young for actual speaking ( for a multilingual child - yes mine do speak late...more on this later) but even him now switches the limited words he has three-way depending to whom he is speaking to. Yes, kids are individuals and we have been very lucky but also there are some approaches that we have tried and tested. Well, this is what has worked for us:  We made it a need for both LingoBabas to speak in the minority languages. This means I make it obvious that it is an absolute necessity to speak to their parents in a respective language. With a toddler that is about to start speaking, we affirm the new word (said in the majo...
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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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