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…
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…
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…
At about 18 months, children start asking questions. At first, they tend to only use the question word “who” or “what”, then around the age of 3 they discover “why”. Like the flow of a river, the whys can rush in all directions, which is natural, and all we have to do is to guide…
At what age should you start studying a new language to avoid speaking with a foreign accent? For decades researchers have tried to find out if there is an age limit. The most recent studies suggest that there is no critical age. Instead, it seems that the musical elements, intonation or pronunciation of our first…
A mother from Barcelona spoke to me the other day about her 8-year-old daughter’s recent conversation with a friend. They had several languages in common, and the suggested that they stopped speaking Hungarian together. She said it wasn’t important as they only went to Hungary in the summer anyway. How should we determine the value…
In our family, swearing was more of a male preserve, and I was surprised that when I visited home as an adult, my aging mother used expressions that I had never heard her use as a child. Perhaps this was because she lived alone, or perhaps it was because her environment had changed, as it…
Psychologists often cite writers and poets to illustrate their own arguments, thoughts, or comments. I’ll take the opportunity to imitate them. And who could provide me with better material than a poet or writer who is multilingual himself? Often, as a reader we do not know if the author whose work we are reading is…
“Why should I take another cake when I already know how it tastes?” – one mother living in Belgium told me her mother-in-law had asked her. She must have found this argument surprising to remember it so clearly. Of course, you could also ask why we shouldn’t have the same cake twice, because we already…
