spanish

Editor’s note: For a long time now, we’ve been hoping to bring the dad perspective to raising bilingual children. While we were in Miami in September for our Bilingual is Better book launch, we met Ryan Pontier, the author of the guest post below. We were immediately impressed by his commitment to bilingualism — particularly because Spanish is not his native tongue. Ryan, however, hasn’t allowed that to stop him in his journey to raise his baby girl Anna bilingual.Read More ...

Do you love trabalenguas? I do, but it never really occurred to me that tongue twisters are a great tool to reinforce my kids’ Spanish. I mean, I’ve recited a couple of my favorite here and there, but I hadn’t taken the time to formally introduce Vanessa to them til this weekend. About four weeks ago, my family and I went to San Diego for my stepson’s graduation from the Marines. Although we were only there for a long weekend,Read More ...

I grew up in a community where Spanish and English were spoken simultaneously. My parents were definitely Spanish-dominant in their fluency and identity as Mexican immigrants. Most of their friends spoke Spanish and were from Spanish speaking countries. As a child I had to learn which of our guests primarily spoke Spanish, which often times were also the ones I gave a kiss on the cheek instead of a handshake. I lived in a bilingual and bicultural environment, but withRead More ...

Living in downtown Orlando gave me some opportunities to speak Spanish, but it turns out that they were miniscule compared to the practice I’m going to get in my new neighborhood. A month ago, my family moved to the south side of town, closer to where I grew up. I feel comfortable living over here, everything we do is more convenient to our house, and we found a great Montessori school for Isaiah. I didn’t expect to be surprised byRead 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 ...