Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Bilingual carnival at Bilingual Readers!

alphabet lettersI'm pleased to announce there's a bilingual blog carnival on today at BilingualReaders.com — Let the carnival begin! and ¡Que empiece el Carnaval! — and that I have two articles featured.

If you're interested in raising your kids multilingually, head on over to read the participants' posts! They really sound great, on topics such as adding a fourth language, questioning the "critical period" for learning language, mixing languages creatively, and strengthening the minority language.

Since I wasn't sure old posts were preferable, I wrote a new (well, found an old but unpublished) post to submit to the carnival, a book review of 7 Steps to Raising a Bilingual Child, but when I went to email my submission to the carnival-powers-that-be, I started re-reading the directions and wondering if my blog showed enough of a bilingual bent to be included. I've meant to write more about our bilingual journey, and I still do, but I don't have a great deal up right now. So I added, as a reference, my original long post (with a super-long title) on speaking German with Mikko: "Monolingual raising a bilingual baby, or why we're choosing a German immersion preschool."

And then I waited. And Tweeted my anxiety. And someone pointed out that I, too, run a carnival and am scary. It's true. Except for the scary part.

And when I heard back, the email started "We finally decided..." and I drew in a deep breath to temper my disappointment and then continued the sentence to find out...oh, wait, you already know. Both the links are in there! Right, I kind of killed the suspense on that one, didn't I?

Do you want to see what I look like referenced in Spanish? I know you do!

Lauren, de Hobomama, nos hizo llegar un interesantísimo post titulado Monolingual Raising a Bilingual Baby, en el que comparte las razones por las que su marido y ella decidieron enseñar alemán a sus hijos, aunque ninguno de ellos es un hablante nativo de ese idioma. Además, Lauren escribió una magnífica reseña del libro 7 Steps to Raising a Bilingual Child, de Naomi Steiner, que puede ser de gran ayuda para los padres que están buscando respuetsas a sus dudas.
Cool, huh? En Español, I wrote a reseña magnifica, which sounds pretty impressive, I think.

I mentioned this on Twitter, but I didn't share it with everyone else, so I will cram it in here. I took Mikko to a Mexican restaurant to get him out of the house while Sam cleaned for the impending Visit of Doom (i.e., his mother-in-law coming to visit...yes, you can do the math and figure out it's my mother), and the waitress spoke to us only in Spanish. She started off with asking Mikko if he wanted leche to drink, so I translated that for him. Well, from then on, I guess she decided she could keep up the Spanish, so she did. I didn't get any sense that she was unaware of what she was doing or that she couldn't have spoken English to us if she'd wanted to; I think she was operating a little Spanish-immersion restaurant experience. She came by at intervals to lob me high-school Spanish softballs, asking how old he was and what his name was. I think I got all the answers right! It was fun, and it made me think Mikko should maybe tack on another day at his preschool, but in the Spanish section! Wouldn't it be great to have so many places available to absorb the spoken language and the cultural aspects as well?

Trilingual, here we come...

Read the carnival posts this month at Bilingual Readers, and to participate yourself, get the carnival schedule and sign up for the newsletter at Bilingual for Fun!

Photo courtesy Stephen Tainton on stock.xchng

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