Bicultural Vida

Spanish in Japan! I never thought that I would be using Spanish while working in Japan, but Spanish was more common than I ever imagined it to be. My first job out of college was teaching at a Japanese high school. Having worked so hard to learn Spanish, I was determined to keep my language skills while teaching English and studying Japanese. I had feared that while in Japan my fluency in Spanish would diminish, but every now and then,Read More ...

When I reflect upon “dialect” in English, I think of regional accents. Although vocabulary also shifts as one travels from Alabama to Wisconsin to London, England, this is not as apparent to me as the contrast of dialects in my second language: Spanish. My journey con hablando español has been mottled. In middle and high school, I learned grammatically correct Spanish, with a heavy emphasis on the particularities of el idioma de México y de España. As tends to beRead More ...

We’ve spent the last four days introducing you to our recently chosen regular contributors. Today, we bring you our fifth one. But before we let you meet her, we’d like to recap who the first four ones are and what you can expect to read in their posts. Chelsea – a 20-something single mom of a little boy she’s raising bilingual even when Spanish is not her first language! Susan – a non-native Spanish speaker mother of two boys she’sRead More ...

We hope you’ve been enjoying reading about our first three regular contributors. In case you haven’t had a chance to “meet” them, so far we’ve introduced you to Chelsea (a single, non-native Spanish speaker raising her son bilingual); Susan (another non-native Spanish speaker raising her two boys trilingual); and Elsie (a Latina raising her daughter bilingual who has promised to share her abuela’s recipes with all of us!). Today we’d like you to get to know Kim who brings aRead More ...

We are thrilled to be introducing you to our five regular contributors. As we mentioned on Monday, each one brings a different perspective on raising bilingual and bicultural children. We have already introduced Chelsea, a single mom who’s raising her son bilingual (English/Spanish) even when Spanish is not her native language. On Tuesday, you met Susan, a mother of two who is raising her son trilingual (English/Spanish/German) and has tons of ideas on how to do it. Today, we’d likeRead More ...

As we mentioned yesterday, this week we’ll be introducing you to our five regular contributors – one each day. We hope you had a chance to meet Chelsea yesterday. If not, we suggest you go here. Today, we’d like you to meet Susan who, together with her husband is raising her kids trilingual. Welcome to our ever-growing SpanglishBaby familia! Susan O. Stephan is a credentialed Spanish Teacher in the state of California who earned her Master’s degree in Educational LinguisticsRead More ...

You might remember that back at the beginning of the year we announced we were looking for regular paid contributors and we asked those of you interested to send us your submissions for consideration. We were honored to receive such an enthusiastic response from so many of you. Choosing just four was not easy. In fact, we ended up adding one more regular contributor for a total of five. We’re happy to announce that this week we’ll be introducing youRead More ...

When we launched SpanglishBaby almost six months ago, I wrote a post about why raise bilingual children. In the weeks and months following, we’ve tried to write about or at least mention the latest studies related to bilingualism which have given us even more reasons why it’s such a great decision to raise our children bilingual. But we’ve never really taken a closer, more detailed look at why bilingualism is one of the best gifts we can give our kids.Read More ...