Celebrating The Bilingual Child Month with a post about language learning phases and ages. Is your child speaking on time? Have you been wondering if your child is reading too late? Writing too early? When teaching our kids South Asian heritage languages, it's easy to fall into a comparison trap - with our families back home, with other Desi families in your adopted country, and even with our own kids’ English language abilities. 3 tips for keeping the peace while raising a bilingual family: First: Stop comparing! Second: Don’t listen to misinformation and get the facts. Third: Manage your expectations. 5 stages of language learning*: Listening comprehension: Start at birth. Start before birth! Babies are listening and building neural pathways to...
Thank YOU for visiting our website and checking out our blog. We aim to produce content that empowers parents, makes language learning easier and grows multilingual resources. When I grew up in the US in the 70s/80s/90s, there were not a lot of options to learn my heritage language - Malayalam. You learned it from the Church or participating in Kerala Samajam. There weren't really classes to take and my parents eventually gave up on me learning the language. Today it's a very different scene. Social media has given us a plethora of resources: You can watch cartoons, movies and shows in multiple languages through streaming services like Hotstar or Netflix. There are whole communities with cultural academies, language...
BhashaKids has started a series of Bilingual Read A Louds on Saturdays, at 10(ish) AM EST. Log on to our Instagram Account and watch LIVE as our friend Reading Yaanai/ Haathi translates simultaneously as I read in English. We've done 2 in Hindi and 2 in Tamil so far, with Marathi, Kannada and Malayalam down the pike. The readings have featured Eric Carle and Mo Willems books so far, with vocabulary notes in the captions. The read a louds are about 15 minutes long, so you can easily log on to the account and share with your kids later. Make this part of your home language immersion. Bilingual read a louds are wonderful ways to add immersion experiences and expose...
