Jabberlingual

Jabberlingual

The Torn Bilingual Soul?

by Alice
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By Alice Lapuerta Let’s talk about “Bilingual Identity.” The split bilingual soul. The fragmented personality, the eternal half, the uprooted Third Culture Kid eternally searching for home. It is interesting that whenever I read something on the “Bilingual identity,” I do so with complete detachment. It takes a while for it to sink in: they [...]

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Jabberlingual

Things in the Attic: Of Cassette Tapes, Memories and Forgotten Languages

by Alice
The author

By Alice Lapuerta The things one finds when one rummages through the attic. An old shoe box with dusty cassette tapes, for instance.   The sweet voice of a little girl babbling away, telling stories, singing songs. That was me, when I was 5 years old. How surreal, listening to one’s childhood self. What totally [...]

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Jabberlingual

The Evil Majority Language

by Alice
Time for the community language

By Alice Lapuerta The majority language = the bad language. This has somehow firmly embedded itself in my mind. It’s the language that you should avoid speaking at all costs. It will, ever so deviously, take over if you don’t watch out. So you better make sure it’s safely caged and stays where it belongs: [...]

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Jabberlingual

Monolingual Envy

by Alice
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By Alice Lapuerta There are times when I wish we were just like the ordinary monolingual family next door. Let’s call them the Schmidts – The Schmidts just speak the majority language German all the time. They don’t wake up every morning wondering what language to speak. They don’t need to worry about whether OPOL [...]

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Jabberlingual

The Little Magical Computer Will Make My Kids Bilingual

by Alice
Dominik using his new Spanish-speaking toy.

By Alice Lapuerta I have decided that my kids are going to be fluent Spanish speakers after all. My kids are going to be balanced trilinguals! Hooray! We’ve been saved… …by a toy.

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Jabberlingual

Kazakhstan! How My Multilingual Child Learned to Write

by Alice
Kazakhstan (the German spelling) written by Dominik

By Alice Lapuerta Yesterday Dominik’s Kindergarten teacher had a bit of a crisis. She approached me, her face serious. “You know what your son did today?” Uh-oh. He probably threw a tantrum. He refused to share the Thomas train with another kid. He peed in his pants. He threw the puzzles out of the window. [...]

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Jabberlingual

What to Do About Spanish. Otra vez!

by Alice
Jabberlingual_Spanish_Books

By Alice Lapuerta What to do about that Other Language? The third one. The one that is definitely under-represented in our household, because the native speaker who is supposed to represent it, aka The Hubby, is not always here to speak it, on account of a very demanding full-time job that includes frequent business trips [...]

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