multilingual

I take my boys to a weekly Spanish class. The majority of the children have had some exposure to the language, which makes this the ideal class for us. My sons always use Spanish with me, and it is the language that they use with each other. During the art session of this class, one of the mothers started to ask me what I have done to get my kids to be so fluent in Spanish. I rattled off theRead 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 ...

“Back to basics” is at the core of everything I believe about teaching my children multiple languages; love is the essence. Here’s a list of seven basic virtues to help us get back to the basics in creating homemade multilingualism – with love! 1. Love My passion for languages begins with my love for my family whether in the USA, France, Mexico or Peru. I keep in touch with them through phone calls, letters, the Internet and visits. My childrenRead More ...

Before our baby was born, my husband and I had a silent agreement, “We’d raise a multilingual child.”  I won’t deny, I was worried, would this delay her speech? I often wondered if she’d be confused by hearing all three languages spoken at once. Friends said babies were like sponges, they absorb everything, so my worrying went away, well, decreased.  And so our daughter was born and we began speaking all three languages.  My husband’s native language is Croatian, mine isRead More ...

Who gets to be trilingual? The situation always seems to present itself as such: one parent speaks one minority language and the other parent another minority language and they live somewhere, where the majority language is spoken. What about those parents who are monolingual? What about parents who are both what they call heritage speakers of a minority language, like myself? What about parents who would LOVE for their children to speak more than one language, but can’t afford toRead More ...