Raising Bilingual Kids - The Challenges

Raising bilingual kids is no easy feat! I have to admit that since pregnancy with Nena, the amount I speak Spanish has gone down. Sometimes my plate is so full, or my patience is so low, that the first thing that comes out of my mouth is English. I have to constantly remind myself to speak Spanish. Then there is the fact that Chili watches shows on Netflix a little every night, in English. I wish they would put some kids' programs in Spanish on there! So now she is talking increasing amounts of English(ok, almost exclusively English), although she understands 100% of what I say in Spanish. I am hoping with the move that she will be exposed to a little more Spanish. We continue to try every day to increase language exposure with the goal of acheiving fluency in both languages. Poco a poco...

200 Words and Analysis

Early in the month of October, Chili hit her 200 word mark. She is picking up new words everyday and loves to copy things she hears even if she doesn't know what they mean. She is enjoying being able to communicate, and we get such a kick out of hearing what she is thinking. The linguist in me of course had to do a brief analysis of her language aquisition. She has more than 104 words in Spanish and more than 42 words in English. She has more words (about 16) referring to animals and noises, and more than 22 referring to people she knows or characters (in books or on TV). She is now starting to put words together to show who it belongs to (like "mami gorro" for "mom's hat"). She also has a couple phrases she can use like, "How are you?" (not that she knows what that means, but she hears people say it all the time), "love you," and "alli esta" (it's over there). She really surprised me the other day when she said, "woo, woo alli esta" to tell me that there was a dog over there. My personal favorite is lately when she is asking for something and I tell her not right now, or maybe later, she responds, "mañana." I don't know if she really understands the concept of tomorrow, but she at least is okay with the fact that she's not getting it now. It makes me chuckle every time.

Now that I have written this blog post, it is really bothering me that I don't have my tildes on any of my Spanish words. Does anyone know how to do this when you use a IBM laptop and are writing using Blogger?

Celebrating 100 Words!

I know, I know. Nobody counts their childs words and writes them down one by one. It must be the linguist in me that loves to see her progress, study the ratio of English to Spanish, and just celebrate language learning with each word! Yeah to bilingualism and and big Hip Hip Hooray to Chili!