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…
“We need your help. My family and I recently moved to Germany. My daughter is looked after by her nanny during the day, but it’s quite difficult due to language differences. My daughter doesn’t know any German yet, only Spanish, but she doesn’t even speak that perfectly. Her nanny asked us to teach her German…
Have you ever thought of watching movies in your mother tongue with subtitles? I mean watching them with subtitles in another language. This can be useful not only to strengthen your second or third language, but also to retain it, if you take advantage of the possibilities inherent in subtitling. Of course, it does matter…
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…
Research shows that dictionary users have a higher vocabulary than those who do not. In a multilingual family it is worth keeping this correlation in mind. We are greatly helped by the fact that, in parallel with the increase in the importance of language learning in recent decades, the range of dictionaries has also undergone…
The extremes are the most striking in relation to multilingual children. Some of these children excel in several languages and possibly in other areas too, while others do not do very well in any of their languages. With regard to the former, it is easy for parents to fall into the trap of considering their…
Did you know that up to the age of one and a half, it is absolutely not recommended for children to watch TV? This includes background TV. Between the ages of one and a half and two, children can watch TV for a maximum of 20 minutes a day, but only with company. This can…
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…
The question of which age is most suitable for learning a foreign language has been studied for decades. It has become clear that it is most beneficial for children if they have the opportunity to hear their future languages simultaneously from an early age. But what if this is not possible and they come into…
A Polish mother asked me after a workshop in Barcelona, “Won’t it be difficult for my son to learn to speak Polish correctly, since this language has consonants that are very difficult to pronounce?” If her Spanish husband had asked me, I would have understood this concern a little better, since, from the point of…
