Question Dear sir or madam, my wife and I are both Czechs living in Czech Republic. Now we have 3-month-old son and I want to rise him bilingual, Czech and English. I speak fluent English, but as you can read, not really perfect. I lived in US for a while and have a...
Question Hello, I wonder about minority language (mL) between parents combined with one parent, one language (OPOL), and the benefits of having spoken/understood several languages during childhood without making it to even receptive bilingualism. We are young...
The countdown to year 2016 has started, so let's look at the year which is coming to an end - here are the top posts of 2015, starting with number 10: 10. Passing on a non-native language to your child, part 1: Considerations Part 2 of this series is on choosing the...
Question Hello, My daughter is in Kindergarten in a German School, where they use the one person, one language method. Both my husband and I have Spanish as mother tongue and we live in a Spanish-speaking country. We don´t know how to speak German, so at home we only...
1 – Это не происходит по мановению волшебной палочки Дети не становятся билингвами «волшебным» образом. Существует миф о том, что «дети впитывают как губки», а значит, они способны выучить любой язык, который они регулярно слышат, но это просто-напросто неправда. Да,...
Due to the nature of my work, I spend a lot of time on-line: researching, reading blogs and comments, finding articles to feature in my newsletter and looking for experts and parents to share their stories. Inevitably, I spend quite a lot of my on-line time on social...
The third part in my series on teaching your child a non-native language is all about different language-learning activities that you can do with your kid. So far in the series I have written about the things you need to take into consideration before embarking on...
Question Dear Rita and all other Family Languages Coaches, I am Shoko, Japanese, and a mother of a son who is 26 months old. My husband is also Japanese and we reside in Japan. I have lived in the States when I was 6-10 years old, and also again when I was 22-25 years...
After taking into consideration all the points raised in the first part of this series, you have decided that you want to give your child the gift of another language. My presumption is that you have discussed this with the rest of the family and everybody agrees that...
One of the most common questions we get to our panel of Family Language Coaches is from parents thinking about teaching their child a language of which the mother and/or father is not a native speaker, and whether this is a good idea. My short answer to this question...