Comments on: Is Your Bilingual Kid Mixing Languages? No Worries, It’s Okay

By: My Daughter Is Not As Bilingual As I Thought | SpanglishBaby™

My Daughter Is Not As Bilingual As I Thought | SpanglishBaby™ — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 17:31:35 +0000

[...] that she just needs to practice it. She responds that she doesn’t know it that well and that she mixes too much. I keep insisting it’s okay, and that she just needs to practice and not be [...]

By: Ana Flores

Ana Flores — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 18:43:46 +0000

Thanks for sharing your story. You’re one of the lucky ones who didn’t even need to make a conscious effort to learn two languages. That’s why the sooner we start with our kids, the better!

By: Paloma Cru

Paloma Cru — Sun, 17 Jun 2012 18:36:23 +0000

I never gave much thought to the bilingual vs monolingual childhood until I was in college. My baby brother was 4 and we were preparing him for school the next year by teaching him to speak only in English, instead of the English/Spanish combo he’d grown up with. One of my college friends was home with me, studying, and asked me what it was like to be bilingual. And the question baffled me. I couldn’t explain that because my world has always included two languages. Some people spoke one or another, many people spoke both.

Raising bilingual children is difficult. Thanks for sharing your experiences.

By: Beth Ortuño

Beth Ortuño — Wed, 30 May 2012 22:24:01 +0000

I am SOOOO grateful for the support from Spanglishbaby. Just like this: “What she does is considered one of the first phases of code-switching and experts agree it takes a well-nurtured bilingual brain to be able to master it. It’s not laziness or lack of knowledge of the languages, it’s just a natural phase”. I can’t tell you how much it means to hear you saying things like this. It takes confidence in what you are doing to work through this phase. It can get frustrating. My son will be 4 this month and does things like using the other language on purpose when I am trying to get him to talk with someone he doesn’t want to talk to. So exactly when I’m trying to have him not be rude, and say something with my coworker or a nice neighbor lady who is trying to talk to him, he has been refusing to say anything to me in Spanish all day, but when the English-speaking adult wants to talk to him that is exactly the moment when he goes into Spanish…

By: Xochitl Oseguera

Xochitl Oseguera — Mon, 28 May 2012 18:56:12 +0000

I was very concerned about my son mixing languages when he was little, now that he is 9, I see how he understands which language to talk depending on the person who he is talking to, the important part is to stay strong answering to them in Spanish *at-all-times* event though they know you speak English because they WILL answer in English and you may thing they are not understanding ( I know many parents who had given up on speaking Spanish to their kids because of this misunderstanding) I agree with Ana, don’t worry, is OK to Spanglish!

By: Elizabeth

Elizabeth — Mon, 28 May 2012 18:13:36 +0000

How interesante, isn’t it, to watch such a little Bebe analyze her language skills! I remember reading (quite a few years back and now I don’t remember from where) that code-switching is considered to be a sign of intelligence! Que chevere!