fluency

We talk about bringing up our babies bilingual, but what about improving and polishing our own bilingual skills? I have heard many of us say that we don’t live in an area where Spanish is spoken or we have significant others who are not native speakers, so English is the dominant language. I lived in the UK for six years, where I went months without speaking Spanish. I even found myself struggling to come up with words when I wouldRead More ...

This week, my daily news surfing brought me to this article from NPR about the unclear future of the Spanish language in the U.S. The author, Luis Clemens, challenges the idea that the growing number of Latinos in America automatically means there will be more Spanish speakers going forward. Those of us in the middle of child rearing in more than one language are familiar with how much work and conscious planning it takes to achieve the end of producingRead More ...

My varied experiences with the Spanish language have taught me that there is one thing bilinguals will always have a surplus of: questions. Fluency is a relative concept; everyone has a different definition of what it means to be fluent in a language, and my most pressing question seems to be Am I really fluent? At my son’s age (3), the questions are more basic, like Why do we say “his” and “her” en inglés, but only “su” en español?Read More ...

A couple of days ago, I overheard my daughter speaking in English while she was playing by herself with her My Little Pony collection. I made it a point to observe her a bit more intently – without her knowledge, of course – just to make sure she wasn’t just saying a few words in English, as she’s done in the past. I don’t know why it surprised me, but the whole time the ponies were speaking English to eachRead More ...