About me

I am a scientist working in a medical research institute in the DC area. After my daughter was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes 5 years ago I shifted my area of research to diabetes. I am married to the most supportive and loving man that comes from the hotel management industry and am a mom to three wonderful kids; 10 year old girl, 8 year old and 2 year old boys and a dog, a real energy booster... I am also a children's author and have one book published in Hebrew titled Tal and the Secret Treasure.

Saturday, December 24, 2011

What language do you speak at home?


As much as I love the English language, I don't think I will ever be able to speak English like I speak Hebrew, nor will I ever be able to think, dream and get upset or excited using any other language than Hebrew. This is just the way I am and that is why my husband and I made a decision, to use Hebrew at home. When we speak to each other it just doesn't make any sense to speak any other language than the one we know best, just like it doesn't make any sense (to us) to speak to our kids a language that we are not 100% fluent in. Children's abilities to pick up new languages are far better than adults' and also they have so many different opportunities to speak English with English speakers, they better not learn our grammatical errors or pick up our Israeli accent. Also, we have only been here for 3 years and our daughter is already correcting us when she hears our English, now where does that place us? Her parents, that in the eyes of a young child, are still supposed to know best?! So it is indeed to the best of everyone's interest that we speak Hebrew to our kids and encourage them as much as we can to speak Hebrew with us. I hope that when they grow up they will appreciate being able to communicate fluently in two different languages. Now here comes the strange part of it: I was sure that all of it is as clear to others as it is clear to us but in the last parents teachers' conference in my son's pre-school I was told that my son has some grammatical issues like mixing the order of the words in sentence sometimes or mixing English together with words that were clearly not English. Well, I wasn't surprised but his teachers were confused when I explained that we speak only Hebrew at home. "That means that he learns English only from us..." they were overwhelmed by the load of responsibility. "Well, he does pick it up from TV shows, friends and sometimes from his sister although they mostly communicate in Hebrew with each other" I explained but it didn't seem to ease much of their surprise. Now, with the new information in mind, they were actually impressed by his English communication abilities. If I had known better I would have told them that right from the start.
Sometimes what seems totally obvious to us might be a complete mystery to others, and bilingual kids might have a slower language development but eventually they usually catch up and grow up to have a full fluency in two different languages.

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