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Supercharge your bilingual or multilingual journey in 2023…and for years to come! Bilingual SuperKids is the culmination of my career and the most powerful way possible to maximize your family’s success and joy over the years of childhood
I’m so pleased to tell you that there’s a new organization which is quickly proving to be an empowering source of support for bilingual and multilingual families around the world. HaBilNet stands for the Harmonious Bilingualism Network and as the homepage states: “HaBilNet promotes and carries out research on harmonious bilingual development. Through HaBilNet you can gain access to research-based sources that will help your family develop bilingualism in harmonious ways.” HaBilNet is the brainchild of Dr. Annick De Houwer,
Want to strengthen your daily efforts, and your long-term success, at raising bilingual or multilingual children? The challenges at The Bilingual Zoo are designed to do just that by offering ideas and inspiration for a range of key actions that can produce very positive results. (And you don’t have to be a member of The Bilingual Zoo community to take part—access to our forum is open to everyone—but since membership is free, why not?) The latest challenge involves what’s probably
This post brings together seven interviews that I’ve given about raising bilingual and multilingual children (and other matters that may surprise you) through podcasts and video. Podcast Interviews Raising a Bilingual Child – Episode 37 Preschool and Beyond, with host Mike Dlott Maximize Your Child’s Bilingual Ability – Episode 125 Bilingual Avenue, with host Marianna Du Bosq How to Raise Happy Bilingual Children – Episode 5 Bilingual Kids Rock, with host Olena Centeno Culture Clash! Something’s Different Here – Episode
In the post Do This One Simple Thing and I Guarantee You Greater Success On Your Bilingual Journey, I talked at length about how establishing and sustaining a habit of writing about your experience on a regular basis can be an especially powerful way of fortifying your efforts and your progress on this bilingual or multilingual quest. (While also producing a valuable written record of your family’s experience for the future.) In that post, I wrote… When it comes to
Questions about the process of raising bilingual and multilingual children—about approaches, tactics, resources, and many more aspects of this experience—are only natural. After all, this is a long journey, with continuous challenges, both large and small, and issues involving effective choices and productive efforts go to the heart of realizing greater success and joy over the childhood years. This is essentially why I began this blog, Bilingual Monkeys, in 2012: My hope, in sharing my experience of working with bilingual
According to Ethnologue, the foremost reference on living languages, there are 7,099 languages spoken in the world today and just 23 of these languages account for more than half of our global population of 7.6 billion people. (See the authoritative Worldometers for remarkable live statistics on our planet’s population.) Among these 23 languages are Malay (#23, with 60.8 million first-language speakers), Persian (#22, with 61.9 million first-language speakers), and Italian (#21, with 63.4 million first-language speakers). Below are the top
If you’ve been following this blog, you know that my children are currently 13 and 10 and that their majority language is Japanese and their minority language is English. At this point, their ability in each of these languages is comparable to their monolingual peers. In other words, they essentially have two native languages and can use both freely to communicate or to read and write. What you may not know—since I haven’t yet mentioned this much—is that my kids
One of the most rewarding things about running The Bilingual Zoo, the friendly (and free) forum I opened in 2014, is the opportunity to follow the progress made by parents and children over time. It’s always a thrill for me when a thread begun by a parent, concerned over a child’s language development, is updated after six months or a year with happy news of stronger progress. This happens regularly, and the latest example is Stefania’s thread, which she updated
One of the deeper themes of my efforts to support the bilingual and multilingual journey of families in the world—as I stress in such posts as Why Raising a Bilingual Child Matters in a World Gone Mad and Why Your Bilingual Child Is Tied, Profoundly, to Hiroshima and Peace—is the idea that children with ability in more than one language can potentially feel keener empathy for others and contribute to creating a more harmonious world through their outlook and actions.
