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YOU ARE WHAT YOU SPEAK

By madeleine kando
I have a confession to make. I have multiple personalities. It is the fate of many people like me who grow up bilingual or multilingual. But you know what? I like being French one day, Dutch the next and American the rest of the time. I find myself being able to put on many different attires. Even though I am not native French, I moved to Paris when I was four years old and that almost makes me a native speaker of this beautiful language. It makes me able to watch French movies without subtitles, read the best literature in the world in it’s original form and dooms me to speak all other languages with a French accent, which people sometimes find ‘charming’ and other times ‘annoying’. Since all one’s memories are closely intertwined with the language one speaks, when I put on my French attire I immediately am transported to the world of my childhood, when I used to walk home from the bakery with a still warm baguette under my arm, and the unique smell of the Parisian streets in my nose....
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Teaching French and Spanish the fun way!

By madeleine kando
Children like to have fun, but they also like to learn. Most adults think that learning and having fun are opposites right? Wrong! Children know that learning and playing go hand in hand. Without fun a child shuts down, closes up like a clam shell. A good example of playing at learning is how a child learns how to speak. The symbiotic interaction between a parent and a baby is a constant back and forth of sounds, giggles, tickles and laughs. And all this playing results in the baby learning the sound system of its native language, then learning words and phrases, and soon the baby has grown into a toddler that speaks English (or French or Chinese). It has played at learning how to speak. Then why should learning a second language be any different? Why should children at a later age be expected to sit at their desk with pencil in hand, trying to memorize new words and be bored out of their minds? Children are born with a desire to play, pretend and experiment. All you need to do is pu...
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