I am reading at multilingualchildren.org about different language systems, different ways of raising multilingual kids. The main ones seem to be: One Person, One Language (OPOL): The father and the mother each speak their native language to the child, as consistently as they can. This way, the child learns to associate the language with a [...]
My wife is from Colombia, and I’m from Belgium (from the part where we speak Flemish which is the same language as Dutch). Between us, we speak English (we lived 5 years in New York) and Spanish (I lived a year and a half in Colombia and my Spanish is reasonable). It’s about 50/50, we [...]
Tagged bilingual kids, minority languageI am getting lots of comments on the first few posts of this blog, thanks everyone. They are all fascinating stories of people teaching their kids all kinds of strange combinations of languages. Victor says: “We’re intending to raise our son, now 10 months-old, speaking English and German. But we haven’t settled on a method [...]
It’s a little too hip, but I still like it. We taught our baby sign language (just a few signs), and it was (still is) really, really useful for all that time between 6 months and 2 years when she couldn’t really speak yet, but still wanted to communicate. In fact, I wonder how babies [...]
Tagged baby sign, sign languageThe first time I realized that Amelia actually understood two languages was when I was watching a movie I just made of her doing some simple signs (we taught her a few signs) a few weeks ago. I realized then that I was asking her to make the signs in Dutch as well as in [...]
This great forum question asks if teaching kids 5 languages is just too much? “My family has rather a unique situation. I live in Italy, but the German-speaking part (South Tyrol), so my first language is German, but of course I am fluent in Italian too. My mother is English so I guess I [...]
I vividly remember the first multilingual kid I ever met. It was in London, in or around 2001. The memory gives me motivation to make the effort with my own kids. I was visiting the house of a friend of a friend. The father was Japanese, the mother French (and they were living in London). [...]
Today I’m starting this blog. Our kid is about 19 months old, she’s not really talking yet (blabbing a lot thought), but when she does it will probably (?) be in Spanish and in Dutch, the two languages we’re raising her in. I think she might speak English too since we speak a lot of [...]