El día del español

Este 18 de junio se celebra el día E, el día del español. Esta iniciativa partió del Instituto Cervantes y ha tenido muy buena acogida en varios países. En el sitio del día e se pueden ver videos de personajes del mundo hispanoparlante que cuentan cuál es su palabra favorita y por qué.

Armé una nube de palabras con Wordle de las que han sido seleccionadas y este es el resultado:

 

Mi palabra preferida es susurrar porque es una palabra suave y sedosa que parece tener un eco.

¿Y tu palabra favorita cuál es?

The Importance of Being Bilingual

I know this video has been around for a while, but it brings a smile to my face every time I watch it. And it is a good example of the importance of learning another language!

La importancia de aprender idiomas, vía Les Luthiers

Encontré este video en el blog Teaching and Learning Spanish, y me sorprendió que nunca lo hubiera visto, dado como soy fanática de Les Luthiers. ¡Me encantó este video!!!! Se llama "Radio Tertulia" y espero que lo disfuten.

Eddie Izzard: Being Bilingual

El comediante inglés, Eddie Izzard, habla sobre la importancia de ser bilingüe, pero antes hace comentarios muy divertidos sobre las diferencias entre el inglés británico y el estadounidense.

Los mitos del bilingüismo. Para detenernos a pensar.

Acabo de leer este artículo de Francois Grosjean sobre los mitos del bilingualismo y ¡me siento mucho mejor! Me doy cuenta de que inconscientemente yo asumía que si uno era bilingüe tenía que tener un perfecto dominio de ambas lenguas, y parece que no es así. Me interesa su perspectiva especialmente porque él mismo es bilingüe, de madre inglesa y de padre francés.

Francois Grosjean es profesor en la Universidad de Neufchatel, en Suiza. Su último libro habla de todas estos conceptos erróneos que la gente tiene sobre el bilingüismo: Bilingual, Life and Reality, publicado en Harvard University Press. Ya lo pongo en mi lista.

Photo by Steven Spell.

María Elena Walsh

María Elena Walsh acaba de morir, y con ella siento que muere una parte de mi infancia. La conocí, es decir, conocí su obra a través de " Zoo Loco", cuando tenía cinco añitos. Me encantaban esos poemas de animales, tan alocados, tan sinsentido y al mismo tiempo tan superlógicos, dentro del mundo de la imaginación.
Aquí van algunos ejemplos de estos poemas divertidos. Años más tarde me enteré de que se llamaban limericks.

Una vaca que come con cuchara
y que tiene un reloj en vez de cara,
que vuela y habla inglés,
sin duda alguna es
una vaca rarísima, muy rara.

Un gato concertista toca Liszt,
una lechuza va y le dice: -Chist,
me aburres por demás,
cambia ya de compás
que tengo ganas de bailar el twist.

Un gallo a una gallina preguntó:
¿Cocorocó? ¿Cocorocó cocó?
la gallina, indecisa,
primero le dio risa,
pero después le contestó que no.

Parece que en Japón había un mono,
Que dormía la siesta con kimono.
- Qué cosa rara es
- decía un japonés
- ver a un mono en kimono haciendo nono.

Encontré un video del gato concertista. Creo que necesitan tener cuenta en facebook para verlo.

If you are Latino you speak Spanish, right? Wrong!

I want to have a garden. Every winter I fantasize in all the carrots, beans, and eggplants I will tend during spring and summer. Truth is I barely manage to get some decent tomatoes in a big pot. I know why my returns are so paltry: I don't plan in advance preparing the soil, getting the seeds, watering as needed. Fortunately, I did plan my kids path to bilingualism so in that respect I was able to get a good harvest.

Ana Lomba, Spanish teacher, advocate, and instruction material creator, wrote a list of obstacles Native speakers parents meet when trying to pass their language along to their children. According to the article, every parent and even parents with an Ivy-league degree make the following mistakes:

1. Lack of planning.

2. False assumptions.

3. Unrealistic expectations.

You can read the article here.

In the article, Ana explains how to avoid those mistakes. I would like to add my piece of advice.

How to achieve success.

I define success as having children who are able to communicate fluently in Spanish, with different degrees of proficiency in their four abilities: talking, listening, writing and reading. In my experience as a bilingual parent and a Spanish teacher, the most successful parents are the parents who speak in the language to their children. Excuse me, I made a mistake, a BIG mistake, let me rephrase the previous sentence: Success come to the parents who speak WITH their children in their native language. What I mean is that being able to have a meaningful interaction is key. And here we get into a delicate path. We are entering in the parenting-in-general realm, not just passing-along-a-language zone. I have seen many parents who talk in Spanish to their kids but do not engage them into a conversation. They just tell them to do something, ask them questions, give them orders in Spanish, or try to teach them colors, numbers, body parts with no context al all. It looks like their kids is a tabula rasa, an empty vessel in which we pour our wisdom. It is a one way conversation, if at all, because there is no communication. This is a parenting style that is not conducive to learning a language. What helps the kids to learn a language is to be engaged in an activity, in a game, when there is dialogue (and you can have a dialogue even if the baby doesn't talk back.) Real communication entails at least two people actively listening and talking with each other.

Now, if these families were living in a Spanish speaking country, the environment would take care of the kids learning to communicate in Spanish: family, friends, school, the media, all that surrounds the child is in Spanish, the language stimuli come from many sources, the need to communicate permeates their world. The Spanish speaking families living in an English environment will have to double their efforts to get their kids to be fluent in Spanish. So, when Ana Lomba talks about planning, sometimes this planning has to do with changing parental habits.

This is why I created the Bilingual Mamis y Papis Meet Up a year ago. It is important that parents realize that they have to make an extra effort in getting their kids to speak Spanish. The group provides them with a place to voice their concerns, to practice their Spanish, to share what they are doing to maintain the language at home and to receive information about what others have done and worked.

Families need to know that they are not alone in their path to bilingualism.