benefits

Bilingualism and language learning has been in the news a lot more than usual since 2013 started. Take a look: Bilinguals Have Faster, More Adaptive Brains When They Get Older, Study Finds from ABC News — More proof that the benefits of being bilingual last a lifetime. You can also read Ana’s take on this study on her Babble post. Babies Seem to Pick Up Language in Utero from The New York Times — We knew babies learn to recognize theirRead More ...

Change of Language, Change of Personality? Part II by François Grosjean on Psychology Today — Does your personality change depending on the language you’re speaking? I don’t think mine does… although if I have to give a speech or speak in front of a large audience, I do feel more confident if I do it in Spanish. Prof. Grosjean continues to explore this subject. Top 10 Reasons Your Children Aren’t Speaking Your Language from Multilingual Living — From lack of resources toRead More ...

I’m the product of a bilingual school and I will be forever grateful to my parents for making the decision to give me such an amazing educational opportunity because I’m sure my life would not be what it is today had I gone to a regular school. Unfortunately, I’m currently not able to do the same for my kids. As you’ve probably read here before, my options in terms of bilingual or dual language immersion schools in Denver are prettyRead More ...

*Excerpt from Ch. 2, “Why Bilingual is Better” We could continue citing more research and studies on the benefits of bilingualism, but the truth is that, to many of us, scientific fact is just the icing on the cake. It helps to justify the struggles we might face, or to arm ourselves when we need to defend our decision to raise our children with two languages to those who don’t really get it. However, for most of us already embarkedRead More ...

Editor’s note: During the next few weeks, we’re going to be doing things a bit differently here as Ana and I concentrate in meeting the deadline for the forthcoming SpanglishBaby book. We hope you bear with us. Because we’ve been around for almost three years (wow! when did that happen?), this week we’ll be sharing some classic posts from when it all got started. This post was originally published on January 3, 2011. Last week, Chelsea Kyle shared on our Facebook page an excellentRead More ...