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Silke,

It was a great pleasure to meet your during the MLNetwork meeting last week in Dubai .

I want to say a big THANKS to you: thank you for publishing this e-book “Make Your Child Multilingual” and for letting people like me, who regret not having opportunity to attend your workshop, also benefit from your precious personal experiences and advices by reading the book.

When we moved to Dubai one year ago, I was so excited by the idea that my 5-month baby girl will be trilingual (Mandarin and French from me and my husband and English from the environment) without really knowing what to do nor how to make it happen and somehow just thought she will pick up the languages naturally. I also used to speak to her in 3 different languages (worst even mixing languages in one sentence) depending on the circumstances and thought simply that it will help her to be more exposed to the three languages, common mistakes you have pointed out in the book, “mistake made out of lack of information, yet often with all the good intentions.” It was exactly my case; I had plenty of good intentions but with wrong methods and strategy.

My daughter is now 18-month and I realise that now is the most important and critical period for her languages development. I am so glad that I am more knowledgeable about avoiding mistakes after reading the book and am aware of my role as her language model. Since then my husband and I have adopt a new strategy – one person, one language. We discover that it seems to work well with my daughter as she starts to associate certain words (in one language) to one person like she says “chaud’ (French word meaning hot) to her father, while “tan” (Chinese word meaning hot) to me. It’s just a beginning but we believe we have made the best choice of strategy of our family situation and will stick to it. We are also making our family action plans, step by step following advices provided from the book in order to help us achieve the goals.

Thanks to Silke, this book “Make Your Child Multilingual” helped me not only become conscious about my reasons to raise my daughter trilingual but also realise that I can do a lot to make it a success. I do feel more confident and better quipped now in this exciting long-term languages adventure for my family.

Regards,

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