Question Hello, I am from a Gujarati family and till graduation I studied in Gujarati then I did my MBA. My wife's name is from Rajasthan and till graduation she studied in Hindi, then did her MBA. We have a 3-year-old daughter and we are planning her education. We...
https://youtu.be/Ky4nzxpeNAU Fantastic interview with Professor François Grosjean, my all-time favourite specialist on bilingualism, conducted by Fabrice Jaumont, Education Attaché at the Cultural Services in New York. The video is brimming with useful information,...
Choosing the topic for this month’s Raising Multilingual Children blogging carnival was actually very easy. “What do parents ask me most about?” I pondered and instantly I thought “How to motivate my child to speak the minority language?” My fellow bloggers – who all...
Questions Hello, I have been recently thinking how and when to teach my girl letters / reading. I find it a little bit difficult or think that it can be confusing for my girl. My girl is Polish / English bilingual kid. For example English word: Octopus. Letter: "O" in...
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...
“Why have you chosen to write about bilingual children and languages, surely there are more important things in the world – why don’t you write about how important science is?” – this is a question I once got in a comment. The simple answer is – I believe I know quite...
I am very happy with how my daughters have grown up to speak several languages, and I am looking forward to supporting the coming generation of our family in the quest of learning to speak more than one language. Looking back, there are certainly a few things I would...
When discussing the language skills of children in multilingual families, you occasionally come across the situation where a child has learnt to understand a language, but is unable (or unwilling) to speak it. Quite often you will find this described as passive...
“You must start speaking your language to your baby from day one!” “She is already three and you haven’t started yet? She won’t sound like a native!” “If you don’t introduce the language before he goes to school, you have missed your chance!” “Older than seven and he...
When more than one language is spoken in a family, parents in face the choice of whether their child should learn both (or all) languages in parallel or if they should let the child’s skills in one language become established before starting to learn the second (and...