Did you know that a child understands up to five times what they can say? Researchers proved this by examining 18-month-old children, demonstrating that a small child who uses 50 words understands around 250 expressions. This experiment was conducted with monolingual children, and in the case of multilingual children, it is not worth thinking of…
Everyone chooses their acquaintances according to their own sensibilities and interests. We don’t usually think much about it.These relationships develop by themselves. And how does this apply to raising multilingual children? If we manage this a little more consciously, it can be of great help to our children’s language learning. You can organize more frequent…
Bilingual parents are not uncommon among the families we work with in our multilingual education webinars. To be honest, this surprised me at first. As I grew up monolingual, I thought that if anyone was going to struggle with the task of educating their children in different languages, it would be those of us who…
Encouragement and motivation are good for everyone. But why are they so important for children who grow up in a multilingual environment? Firstly, because learning a language is not an overnight process, even if you start early. Secondly, because multilingual children are surrounded by many monolingual people who speak their dominant language with great confidence…
When they start their own families, our multilingual children will face this situation and some parents have already turned to me for help in this matter. For example, I spoke to a German mother of Turkish origin and a bilingual Basque-English mother. They did not have it easy, living in Barcelona, but they both managed…
In my last workshop, a French father who lives in Spain told me that the silent phase lasted 4 years for his first child. He spoke to his son in French, but his son never spoke a word of French back; if he did reply, it was always in Spanish. Then, on his return from…
