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Showing posts with the label multilingualism

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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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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TRIP TIP - Nordic Design Exhibition - LONDON,UK

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LingoLiving recommends Discover a new language through design. If you are in London, get your kids to discover Scandinavia not just in IKEA. V&A Museum Of Childhood is currently holding   Nordic design exhibition . This has been a fantastic way for our children to explore that "funny" shape on the map of Europe and what comes from there. You may even try to learn few words in Swedish, Norwegian, Finish or Danish yourself There is amazing play area, small cinema room showing Pippi Longstocking ,  Moonins and other Nordic cartoons. Great way to discover a language!  Apart from amazing design there are books on display - in original languages - great  prompts to start conversation about languages. We had a great fun. And if nothing we will now try to find all the Scandi and Nordic authors in our library - Astrid Lindgren, Hans Christian Andersen, Tove Jansson,Soren Olsson...
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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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