Profile: Annika with Emma, 11 and Sara, 6
Location: Helsinki, Finland
Main language: Finnish
Second language: French
1. What is your favorite activity that helps your daughters
learn a 2nd language?
Reading! We're a family of readers. The girls are subscribed
to magazines in French, and whenever we go to France we reserve one suitcase
for books and fill them with gems we find at second hand book stores (Boulinier
in Paris is our absolute favorite!). Humor is one of our best tools, we often
look for books and CDs that are funny. As an example, Le Prince de Motordu is a
prince who always uses the wrong word, but which sounds like the real one. Our
daughters thought it was really funny and made a game out of doing the same.
Same thing with music, they loved the funny lyrics of Mademoiselle Prout and
kept singing them over and over again. It's a great way to learn vocabulary.
2. What is a helpful tool or technology tool you
use?
Skype! I don't know how we could live without it! We skype
with the grandparents at least once a week as a family, and they often skype
with Emma in the afternoon when she comes back from school before the rest of
us. Another tool I recently discovered and am loving already is the Giga Tribe.
It's a peer-to-peer private file sharing network and great for sharing movies
or music with family living in the minority language country. The grandparents
can record kids' tv shows on TV and share them with us this way.
3. What is your #1 challenge? What helps in
overcoming this challenge?
It's without a doubt that as the children grow, more and
more of their lives happen in Finnish. Their friends speak Finnish, hobbies and
activities are in Finnish - and only limited time in the evenings with dad in
French. To overcome this we focus on French at home and in the past year or so
I've started to speak more and more French at home too. The one thing that
helps above anything else, however, is that we travel to France at least twice
a year. In the summer the girls spend 7-8 weeks in France with the
grandparents. This keeps the French fluent, but by Christmas we can always tell
that they need to be immersed in French for a few weeks again.
4. Any tip or advice you have for other parents?
Reinforce the minority language in all possible ways and
especially by exposing your children to other speakers of your language. Look
for recently-arrived expat families from your minority language country - they
are probably happy to meet locals and it will be great language practice for
your children. Travel to the minority language country as often as
circumstances allow.
5. What drives you to continue?
The satisfaction to see that unlike myself who didn't learn
my mother's native language until I was a teenager, our girls have been living
in their two languages since they were born. It's great to see how they are
completely at ease communicating in both, and have a strong bond with their
French family. I truly feel that life is so much more interesting with two
languages and cultures!
You can find out more about Annika, her family and tips on bilingualism on her facebook page Be Bilingual.
