Author: nonnativemommy

Finding more inspiration – MEC

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When E. became 6 months old, I was on the net all the time when she was sleeping to find more inspiration on raising a child bilingual here in Hungary. I wanted to find other moms who were in the same shoes as me. And I found one on facebook: M. organised  the so-called Mums’ English Club (MEC) in her district in Budapest. It was totally free of charge. M. raises her daughter bilingual, too. MEC is and hour/hour and a half get-together where moms and their babies come together. Moms chat while the kids are playing. Baby rhymes and songs in English could be included but it’s not a must. The main point of the club is to create an English environment for the children, where they can hear that English is another, natural way of communicating with one another.

I was over the moon to find M. who is working on the same, creating as many opportunities for her daughter to be in an English-speaking environment. We corresponded a lot, she supported me, and helped me in numerous ways:

  1. M. inspired me to organise a MEC in my district
  2. She introduced me to MAKATON sign language as a possible link between Hungarian and English (I’ll write about it in details in another post)
  3. M. recommended many books for babies – self-made, translated, or originals (see a later post)
  4. She encouraged me not to give up, or shilly-shally when facing difficulties or disappointment

Thanks you, M.

You can find this group of Hungarian and non-Hungarian moms here on facebook. And this community is growing, you can find some groups in the country-side, too. It might happen that one day it’ll be a Hungary-wide project.

After all, I made a poster and advertised our MEC in the library nearby, and on the net.

Soon the first MEC took place 22 January 2012. It was an hour long and only one mom and her 11-month-old baby came. Still, it was such a victory. Something I managed to make up in order to get closer to my aim.

 

Later on, within a month, 2 other moms contacted me and by the end of February we were four moms and four kids chatting and playing and having fun in English. Now we meet on a weekly basis, if holidays, sickness do not chime in. If the above ad has drawn your attention and you feel like joining us, do not hesitate to contact me.

Unfortunately, two of the moms are going to take their children to nursery as they’re going back to work, so I need to put out some more posters in the area again to find new moms, new playmates.

From birth to the 6th month

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As I have already mention my determination to raise a bilingual child didn’t realise at the very beginning. I did it half-heartedly after E.’s birth. I was singing a lot to E., who really enjoyed it, more than the Hungarian songs. She calmed down more quickly when I sang two of the songs: Lavender’s blue dilly, dilly and Hush little baby. So there was time when she couldn’t calm down and I was singing these two songs for 30-40 minutes without any break.

During this first period I started to read books on the topic: Make your child multilingual by Silke Rehman and 7 Steps to Raising a Bilingual Child by Naomi Steiner and I found both of the books very supporting and practical, still they don’t deal much with a totally monolingual environment, where the second ‘mother tongue’ is a learnt language for the parents, and it’s the parents decision to raise the child bilingual. They mainly focus on mixed marriages, where one parent speaks a language and the other speaks a different one, or monolingual families living abroad and the countries language is the dominating one. Both books  discuss more or less the same topics focusing on determination of the parents, the consistency and a flexible plan. I do not want to go into details and give a review as I’d like to concentrate on what we actually do in our everyday life, but definitely these two books were really good theoretical and practical basis.

The authors emphasise the TIME factor a lot; how much time is spent on the languages. They recommend 30-40 percent of the child’s day to be spent on the minor language, which is English in our case.

So I “wasted” the first 6 months. If I could start it again I would speak English to E. from the very beginning in a natural way as in Hungarian, but I did not. So she heard natural spoken English every now and then for 6 months. The positive side of it is regularity, which is also a very important factor. Every day I sang songs for her or told her rhymes no matter how our days were going.

Around the 3rd month we started to watch videos on youtube, though only for 5-10 minutes per day. I know there are a lot of different views on the topic (whether to let a baby watch moving images at this early age or not, but I found 5 minutes per day won’t do any harm. According to some viewpoints, moving images have a bad effect on the child’s brain, imagination).
She liked watching these videos so slowly we increased the time for 10-15 minutes per day until the end of the 6 months.

The following videos were and still are her favourites by KidsTV123:
The Animal Sound Song
The Shape Song
Red Rabbit Green Gorilla
Phonic song
Twinkle, twinkle little star

Of course, the list has grown by now but I’ll write about it later.

We usually watched the videos 2 or 3 times a day for 5 minutes each occasion. When E. got whiny it was a great way to refresh her, or keep her busy when she was a little bored. From one week to the other she enjoyed it more and started to smile at the characters. She also recognised the song when the first image came up or the song began.

In this period my main focus was on fun and regularity. We didn’t overdo it, just enjoyed being with E. and see how her intellect opens up.

About our family

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The most important of all is that the close family are all Hungarians. There might be an exception in the near future. My sister-in-law-to-be is a Spanish speaker, which is great news for us if we take the possible other languages for E. to learn apart from English into account.

D. is daddy, my husband who I met in 2009 December.
2010 (July): we moved to our newly bought home
2011 (May): we got married
2012 (May): E., our daughter was born

D. speaks several languages: English and German in the first place on high levels. He also speaks Spanish and French. I don’t know much about his other languages, like Italian Serbian, Croatian, Chinese as I haven’t heard him talk in these languages but he spent several years learning them. No comment I guess.

My brother-in-law lives in Germany with his Spanish speaker girlfriend. So he has English, German, Spanish, too. (July 2013. – they got married so official we are a multilingual family 🙂 )

E.’s grandparents on D.’s side speak German as well. One of D.’s uncles lives in the UK with his Spanish speaker wife. Their daughter is probably the first bilingual in the family as she speaks Spanish and English as well. What a pity they don’t pay attention to her Hungarian so much. She would be multilingual then.

My Mom learnt Russian as everybody else here in Hungary at her school time, but, alas, she has forgotten all of it, though she used to be really good at it.

I, myself, speak (and teach) English, but also learnt German and French. Unfortunately, they are so deep down I cannot see them anywhere in me. However, in the future I’ll brush them up, when E.’s going to learn some other languages.

As for languages, we are well-off. We can’t complain.

If you are more interested in our family in more detail you can find it on a separate page.

The beginning

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Huh, where shall I start? It all began long, long time ago when I became obsessed with the English language as a teenager. Slowly I became an English teacher thanks to lots of great teachers, the support of my Mummy, my persistance and love of the language and the connected cultural matters.

In 2012 my baby, E., was born, and while I was still pregnant with her I was wondering whether to raise her bilingual. As both my hubby and I  are native Hungarians living in Hungary, it seemed out of place, a non-sense thing to do as the English input we have is very little, not to mention the fact that it is very difficult and pricey to ensure that our child will get enough English input under these circumstances. So I did research on the Net, bought books on the topic (see a later post) and tried to find people who do the same. And from time to time, my belief got stronger and stronger that raising E. bilingual IS a great idea, what’s more, it’s managable.
When she was born, I was knackered even shocked by the coming of my baby, though I had been praparing for her for a long time. It was great and horrible at the same time. The first 6 months I couldn’t concentrate on our bilingual project so much. Yes, it’s true that even in my tummy she heard a lot of English as I was teaching till the end of my pregnancy. After her birth I sang a lot of English lullabies to her, however I did not speak to her in English.
When our life got a little easier when she turned 6 months I decided to speak to her in English when we are just the two of us, which meant most of the time during the weekdays as Daddy worked, and Grandmas’ being around became less frequent.

When I’m starting this blog, E. is almost 11 months old now and we have a great balance between Hungarian and English. There will be posts about what we have done so far, what we have reached, what we have been doing to increase the English input in her life. Then I’ll go on with a regular update on our status. I do not know how long I’ll have time to post or how long we will last with our project, but I hope for years and years. I wish this blog would live until our second child is born, until we start picking up new languages. Or until my grand-daughter is born and will be raised bilingual as well. Wishful thinking… These are only hopes and wishes for the future and time will tell if we can manage to do so.