In the beginning...
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bilingualbabies
Posted on: 04/09/08
In the beginning...
Many see our family as particularly passionate and dedicated to multilingual education. Afterall, we have a website on the topic :) As with so many other things, it's sometimes hard to figure out exactly how we got here.Before we ever had children, I did dream of teaching my kids another language, but it was with the sort of vague idealism that has little to do with the rough and tumble reality of parenting. I had always thought I would actually go back and master Cantonese, the language my parents had taught my sister and me when we were small, so I could teach my children "properly."
Then, all of a sudden (well, not really, but doesn't it feel that way?), we had a baby. Too late for those language courses now! So, I just jumped right in and starting speaking as much Cantonese as I could to our baby. I was lucky to receive a tip from an acquaintance about the "one parent - one language" approach and made an effort to always speak Cantonese to our son. For some time, we maintained this so well that our older son, K.C., would not only translate Cantonese into English for my husband, but do the reverse for me! My husband deserves a lot of credit for bearing with us and sitting through many dinner conversations he could not understand.
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