Tips for teaching your child a second language
In this essay (3k+ words) I talk in detail about introducing a child to a second language, using things I have gathered from my own experiences or picked up from other places.
Category Archives: raising a bilingual child
Strategies for guiding a child to speak in a foreign language
As if raising a child isn’t difficult enough, raising a child to speak a language different than the primary language(s) of the country you live in further complicates things. There are various reasons for why parents want their child or children to speak another language, but I’ve heard many stories where the child ends up… Read More »
Free Japanese textbooks (for children with Japanese citizenship)
Many parents living in a country different from where they were born have a desire to teach their children about their home country’s culture and language. There is a plethora of resources online to study foreign languages, but for children often physical books are seen as the best type of media. However, there are not… Read More »
A few hints for teaching a foreign language to children
In the last year or so I’ve had the opportunity to tutor a few young children in Japanese. It’s been a really enjoyable and educational experience, so I wanted to make a list of suggestions for those in a position to teach a foreign language to other children. In my case, the teaching was somewhat… Read More »
Japanese vocabulary list: words about sleep
When I couldn’t sleep the other day, I got an idea for a new Japanese vocab list about, well, sleep. Without enough sleep it’s hard to function in daily life, let alone study Japanese effectively. As with my other vocabulary lists, a majority of the words are those I have heard used by native speakers… Read More »
Gotta catch ’em all (in Japanese): Learning Pokemon cards in a foreign language
In my college days, I was really into the collectible card game Magic: The Gathering, although in the last decade or two I don’t think I’ve played a single game. One of the fun things about having children is the possibility of exposing your hobbies and interests to them, and if you are lucky they… Read More »
Bilingual book of classic Japanese fairy tales released (Mimei Ogawa: The Father of Modern Japanese Fairy Tales)
After doing translations of Japanese fiction for over two years now, I’ve gradually moved from the stage of just putting translations on my blog informally to releasing them in E-book form on Amazon. My first two books were translations of a classic SF Japanese author (Juza Unno), and while that was a great experience, for… Read More »
Some thoughts on language selection and code switching
Learning a foreign language is a challenge no matter which language you choose, and the difficulty achieving fluency depends on how distant it is from your native tongue(s), and whether you are in an environment where you are forced (or at least motivated) to use it daily. But once you become reasonably fluent in a… Read More »
A primer on Japanese emotive sentence-ending particles: ne, na, naa, yo (ね、な、なあ、よ)
One of the tricky things about running a language-learning blog is deciding what to write about. When I first started this blog back in December 2013, I mostly intended to act as support for those learning Japanese without necessarily getting too involved into detailed explanations about fundamental grammar structures that might already be covered elsewhere in… Read More »
Japanese children’s book review: おしりたんてい (Bum Detective) by トロル (Troll)
Many children seem to go through a phase where they are delighted by gross or disgusting things like boogers and farts. I guess you could some of us adults still haven’t grown out of it. (: There are books for young readers that take advantage of this by including these types of gross topics to… Read More »