At the table, Amelia eating with a fork (3 1/2 years old). Me: “Moet je een lepel hebben Amelia?” (Do you want a spoon?) Ame: “Que?” Me: “Een lepel?” Ame: “No estoy bien con este tenedor.” She really understands me when I speak Dutch to her (and responds in Spanish). That’s encouraging.
Since I went on a trip to Belgium a few months ago, I had totally given up on talking Flemish to Ame. It was all Spanish. The motivation was gone. But I’m back, talking Flemish again to her since a few days. She’s really liking it too, it seems, repeating a lot of words, so [...]
We’ve finally moved permanently to Colombia, so Amelia is 100% surrounded by Spanish speaking people now. We’ve been here a few months, she’s almost 2 1/2 now, and starting to speak a lot more. Her sentences are up to 3 words now, her vocabulary is going up fast. I try to speak Dutch to her [...]
Amelia said “No mas” today. Still mostly speaking Spanish. I don’t know how she will speak Dutch if we’re gonna be moving to a full-on Spanish speaking environment (except for me that is) within a few months…
It’s funny, Amelia is almost 2 and starting to use more and more words, and I notice she seems to be speaking mostly Spanish. (As you recall, Maria speaks Spanish to her, everyone else Dutch). She says things like “’pato” (for “zapato”, which means shoe), and “gato” (for cat) and “aleta” (for ‘”galetta”, cookie). So [...]
Here you go, good news about raising multilingual kids: “A study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says that some aspects of the cognitive development of infants raised in a bilingual household must be undergoing acceleration in order to manage which of the two languages they are dealing with. The [...]
We are visiting family these days, and I noticed they weren’t very sure which language to speak to the kid, Spanish or English. I think it should be generally the native language (Spanish in this case), unless you want to encourage that other language explicitly. In any case, I have the feeling those things set [...]
I am wondering if people give their kids extra grammar and writing classes? If you teach your child a language that isn’t spoken or written where they live, you would want them to learn to speak/write well, right? So you might need to give additional classes, with actual exercises etc? Does anyone do this, or [...]
This is a list of myths about teaching multiple languages to your kids. It’s based in part on the list found here. Why don’t you teach them 1 language first, and other languages later, when they speak the first language well? It is easier for a child to learn multiple languages at the same time, [...]
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 [...]