Pronunciation

Laniña´s pronunciation has become pretty good. Clear and distinct, where a year ago she might have mumbled or otherwise failed to pronounce certain sounds or words correctly. This is in both English and Spanish, I mean.

But now she seems to have most sounds pretty well mastered in both languages - and she´ll not be 4 until December! Some more tricky words still cause difficulties, of course, but she´s doing OK.

One thing is still causing a noticeable difficulty, though: She still can´t to the "rr" tongue-trill which is so important and distinctive in Spanish. I´m not too bothered at the minute since I have read that this can cause even young native Spaniards trouble and some are 5 or 6 years old before they master it!

I have recently received one good piece of advice - thanks (you know who you are!). And it is to practice it my imitating the sound of a car: brrm brrm!!

I started this the other day and Laniña enjoyed it very much!!

(She still can´t do it though!!)

Storyplace

If you´ve got kids, you´re very likely already aware that Nickjr.com has some simple online games featuring their key characters like Dora, Diego and the Backyardigans. Over the last few weeks, Laniña has grown to like these very much - possibly too much!

I had been frustrated in not being able to find a Spanish version of any of these games, and in a sudden flash of inspiration I gave up on Nickjr and decided to look for other online games for kids. I did a google on "online games spanish ninos" and after a few clicks got to this:

http://www.storyplace.org/sp/storyplace.asp

It´s great! Simple stories in Spanish, with simple online activities as well as follow up craft ideas for doing at home. I love it!

El alfabeto

This was a tricky one - I really didn't know how we would sort this out at all, and in fact I guess we're still in the middle of it, and may well be for a while yet!

Laniña had been becoming increasingly interested in letters - without any pressure from us, I may add - and has been able to sort of write her name for a good few weeks now. And then there was the alphabet song which she must have picked up from her day nursery: for a while she was singing A B C D S I O with great confidence (very cute) but she seems to have the right version now.

So we got out the big alphabet poster and put it on her door and she likes to find the letter we say - but this is where the trouble arises: not only are the names of the letters different in Spanish, some of them sound like the names of other letters! E and I and A are particularly confusing.

So, what to do? Well, I didn´t really know so out of pure inertia I simply ignored the problem and on only a couple of occasions so far has Laniña made a mistake based on taking the letter from the other language and I´ve just said something like "yes that´s E in English, but in Spanish it´s I" and Laniña just sort of shrugs and gets on with it. So, not so much of a problem after all!

If only all problems went away just by ignoring them!

Mummy's silly!

Well sometimes Laniña uses her Spanish in very particular ways. Being a very bad father, I have taught her how to use computer games, which she quite enjoys. She only does this with me. Now the Spanish word juego is for any type of game, but Laniña now uses juego like this: "I wanna do a juego" meaning that she wants to play a computer game. I think there´s a word in linguistics for this; when a word with a broad meaning is adapted to mean something specific.

Anyway, that´s not very funny in itself. What´s funny is that the word juego has now sort of entered our family dialect to mean computer game, even if speaking English. BUT - Spanish Js are kinda hard to say. So when Laniña´s mother said, "You can have a (j)uego after your dinner," Laniña´s response was:

"Ha ha ha, Mummy´s silly! ´S not uego - it´s Juego!!"

Oh dear, pronunciation corrected by three-and-a-half year old... Still, glad she noticed the difference, though!

Holidays in Spain!

So, finally we got to head back to Spain for a week - Laniña was also there with us for a week about the same time last year, but she didn´t really have any memories of it at all.

Laniña and I had talked about it a good bit beforehand, including pointing out that everyone there would speak Spanish and that she would have to speak Spanish to them too. And when we got there, the amazing thing was that she really seemed to take this on board a bit. Of course she didn´t believe me at first (she never does; probably quite sensible, really!) but we quickly noticed that as soon as she heard other kids interacting in Spanish, she started copying them right away and it was a joy to listen to! She hadn´t spoken to me much in Spanish for nearly a year (she used to mix English and Spanish freely) and I hadn´t been pressuring her to, so this was great. She also started joining in with some of the Spanish songs that I sing to her. Lovely.

One small problem, however, was that, having accepted that other people speak Spanish (she used to think it was only me!), she still thinks that everyone can speak English. Towards the end of the week it was starting to dawn that she would have to speak Spanish for some people to understand her, but I´m not sure it has fully clicked yet!

A further decision that I have reached is that, as a result of seeing that, obviously, her Spanish isn´t as developed as her English through lack of practice, I am going to encourage her more explicitly with "What´s that in Spanish?"-type questions. So far, she has responded really well to this and sometimes has spontaneously announced something in Spanish, and followed up with: "See, I´m speaking Spanish!"

Good girl!

Vacaciones

Well, it's the holidays and that means that Laniña gets to see - and hear - a lot more of me. I´ve been off work for about two weeks now and have noticed two fascinating, yet probably quite obvious things:

First week off and I was away on my own, minus partner and sproglet. When I returned I noticed that Laniña´s ENGLISH had improved tremendously. Interesting. Her English is within normal parameters of development, yet my partner and I both feel that Laniña is slightly behind some of her contemporaries. This may or may not have been caused by my speaking Spanish to her, and now it seems that that is indeed the case, since without Spanish her English leaps ahead. This is perhaps kinda worrying, yet also reassuring since it also suggests that her English can catch up pretty easily should I ever decide to stop with the Spanish (and at this stage, I don´t think she´ll let me - nor do I feel inclined to!).

This week, however, I´ve been hanging out with Laniña loads. And guess what? That´s right! Her Spanish has improved tremendously! What a surprise. She has started replying to me in Spanish again, where she had started basically mostly talking to me in English, and has been attempting longer sentences. So, the stunning conclusion of all this is that the more input in a language my child gets, and the more opportunities to speak, the better she gets at it! Hardly a world-shaking revelation, I´m sure you´ll agree, but nevertheless I find it both reassuring and encouraging!

A Parents' and Teachers' Guide to Bilingualism

So, I sometimes get uncomfortable about the fact that we're really just making a lot of our bilingual-metholodogy (so to speak) up as we go along. There are several good sources of advice, including multilingual munchkins (which is a yahoo email newsgroup or something) and a couple of friends who are doing similar things. But at the same time, all kids are different, and all our situations are different, so it's difficult to make direct comparisons.

Therefore it's nice to find a book which pretty much answers, at length and with considerable academic clout, most of the questions which a person might have about issues surrounding bilingualism. I recommend it highly. Colin Baker himself is not only an academic studying issues around bilingualism, but has a bilingual family of his own in North Wales, so you can sense both points of view, academic and personal, throughout the book.

The only thing is that there isn't much about folks in my situation who are bringing up a child through a non-native second language, but nevertheless it was well worth the cover price!