My friend Alexandra Buytendijk, who has two young girls who are being brought up trilingually (English, Dutch, and German), attended a recent workshop in Utrecht on growing up bilingual. She learned that babies pay more attention to speech than any other sound. Babies learn fairly early to identify phonetic patterns \u2013 within a few months in fact. It\u2019s only after patterns have been learned that babies learn words. These greedy little learning devices seem able to absorb whatever we feed them aurally: English, Dutch. . .and it appears they appreciate quality as much as quantity!<\/p>\n
What wonderful news for all of us who have instinctively been reading to babies and children all these years!<\/p>\n
In promoting Betty & Cat, I\u2019m always amazed when someone says, \u201cbut it\u2019s not translated!\u201d \u2013 (I must say it doesn\u2019t happen often, but still\u2026) Growing up bilingual myself, it never worried me when I came across a word I didn\u2019t know \u2013 I instinctively knew that learning was a process and that \u201call would eventually be revealed.\u201d (For years, when I said The Lord\u2019s Prayer, I thought that the sentence \u201cand lead us not into temptation\u201d was a request to keep us from some unpleasant place called \u201cTotemptation\u201d \u2013 no one had explained the meaning of the word\u00a0 \u201ctemptation\u201d – and I enjoyed the sound of the word on my ears.<\/p>\n
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And so, kudos to the cr\u00e8che in Amsterdam Zuid-Oost who saw the value of Betty & Cat immediately and started reading it to their (very) young charges right away. No complaints from them!<\/p>\n
For more information on the workshop or on the organization that presented it, go to www.growingupbilingual.org<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My friend Alexandra Buytendijk, who has two young girls who are being brought up trilingually (English, Dutch, and German), attended a recent workshop in Utrecht on growing up bilingual. She learned that babies pay more attention to speech than any … Continue reading