We have all heard about parents that start teaching their children maths or science, or train them in playing piano or tennis at a very early age. Sometime it feels as if the parents may be trying to fulfil their own dreams through their children and not thinking of...
Being able to speak more than one language is definitely beneficial to your career, I know this from my own experience. Sometimes this manifests itself in ways that you could not have imagined. Finding a job in today’s competitive world is a challenge and will...
So you have decided to bring up your son to speak your family’s languages – what will this mean for your family life? What will be different? 1. A little bit of extra effort There is a bit of extra effort to be put in for you to succeed in raising your son to become a...
Why do not all children in multilingual families grow up to become bilingual? What are the differences between the families that succeed and those who don’t? First, let’s start with some quick myth-busting: How clever or linguistically talented a child is has nothing...
Visiting your family’s original home country is an excellent way of supporting your daughter’s language development. Not only are the trips fun and you all get to meet your relatives and friends “back home”, but they can give an enormous boost to your daughter’s...
Parents in multilingual families face the choice of teaching their child both of their languages from the start or wait with the next language until the first is established and the child is fluent in it. The decision whether to go for one language at a time (also...
Any parent with a teenage daughter in the house has probably at some point had thoughts along those lines. But what if it is a grandmother thinking that? And what if it is actually true? How does it feel not to be able to speak to your granddaughter? How would this...
This is something you should never say to a bilingual, ever. Doesn’t matter how interested you would be to hear something in a particular language. All bilinguals I know absolutely detest speaking “on demand”, just for the sake of it. Language is not about...
By now you have probably noticed that I am rather passionate about families passing on their languages to their children. It’s a chance of a life time, far too valuable to miss. So it upsets me greatly when parents say that they don't speak their language to their...
What to do if a teacher tells you that your daughter’s progress at school is hampered by the use of the minority language at home? How to react if the school thinks that you are making her learning more difficult by insisting on her becoming bilingual? Hearing...