Our experience with bilingual education
Read this in Dutch – Read this in Italian Today, I looked up the lyrics of ‘let it go’ from the movie ‘Frozen’ with my 3,5 year old daughter. Easier said than done. Should I pick the Dutch, English or Italian version? Let me explain why I wanted to look up the lyrics in the […]
Lees meer Learning English with ElsaBilingual infants as young as 20 months of age efficiently and accurately process 2 languages.
Lees meer Bilingual infants control their languages as they listenBilingual education to us also means bicultural education. In this case, our children get to celebrate both Sinterklaas and Christmas…
Lees meer Santa Claus: Sinterklaas ánd Babbo NataleCodeswitching is common with multilingual people. I also see my bilingual child use a lot of loanwords, which I find interesting.
Lees meer Pasta in the polderRead this in Dutch – Read this in Italian “Look mommy, my brother has a beard”, my daughter said. We were eating yoghurt and her brother had yoghurt all over his face. She wanted to know who else we knew with beards, so I told her that she has one grandfather with a beard, and […]
Lees meer Daddy has a flyRead this in Dutch – Read this in Italian This weekend, we went on a trip with a large group of Dutch family. We don’t see these people very often, so every once in a while we need to explain some of the Italian words our children use. Especially in the case of one of Samuels […]
Lees meer Italian bimboHow do I make sure my children have enough esposure time to their minority language? Make sure it’s fun!
Lees meer 3 ways to increase exposure time to minority languageItaliano – Dutch In this blogpost, I stated that I expected my sons first two-word-sentence to be ‘mamma auto‘. This week, somewhat earlier than expected, he decided that he wanted to go with ‘nonno Talia’ (grandpa Italy). He was holding my smartphone and with these two simple words he told me he wanted to see […]
Lees meer Not here but still close to usDutch – Italian “My experience as grandmother of bilingual grandchildren is great! I’m so proud to see Julia develop. About a year ago, she didn’t know she had to speak Italian with her Italian family, so we had to remind her. Now, she knows perfectly how to express herself and she naturally switches from Italian […]
Lees meer When do you know you’re bilingual?Yesterday, my son (1,5) said ‘sì’ for the first time. Finally! It’s probably no surprise he already said ‘no‘ and ‘nee‘ for a while. We also managed to get him to say ‘ja’ with a lot of applause. So, now we’re complete. Still, he has a huge preference for any variation of the word ‘no’. […]
Lees meer One magic word
Speaking more languages 