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[pence]

 Snow Flower and the Secret Fan - current book I am trying to read. 
I still haven't finished the other one but the Book Club's meeting is coming up and I need to get moving.

Still tired, still at my wits on how to be the best mom but I am trying.  How can I ensure that Sarah is bilingual?  My parents and I speak to her in Russian exclusively, we

Comments

[g_the_curious]

Maintaining the Greek language and culture was one of my Parents' highest priorities when we were born. Their plan to do so was to use Greek in the home, to visit the "motherland" for long stretches of time whenever possible, and to acquire as much material that was written in Greek as possible (mostly comic books). Mom was a stay at home mom, so she took the further step of giving us "Greek lessons" in addition to school, so that we'd know how to read and write the mother tongue.

As I kid, I was resentful of the home lessons, and the purposeful isolation from mainstream American culture made it more difficult for me to interact with kids my own age. The latter I think was a step too far, though having things like Greek comic books that were enjoyable probably played a major role in preserving the language. But now that I am older, I find that I am grateful to be fully bilingual, even if I have very few people to share that with. Knowing another language natively gives a different perspective on it's own, but it also allows one to visit a country in which the language is spoken far more easily and gain an even wider perspective on the world.

Hearing and speaking the language in the home is one of the best things you can do to ensure your child is bilingual. Having a supply of comic books and/or other reading material that the child wants to read is also an extremely effective method of fostering the language, and one that doesn't require too much work either. I remember all of us being extremely excited when the comic books from Greece would arrive; we'd then disappear into our rooms for hours, reading away.