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A lot of Indians are bilingual or rather trilingual. We speak our mother tongue, our mother language (generally Hindi) and of course English. We can easily move from one language to another, without much trouble! Being bilingual or knowing more than one language has multiple advantages as shown by research! Here are some products that will help on your child's bilingual journey -
Hindi Play & Learn - Shoonya is an iOS app from Shoonya Digital. In this tech era, where education is via
Ingenio has really come up with a nice educational toy if you plan to make your kids familiar with
This is a bilingual book written by Aarti Chandnani, is called Swar,
Pratham Books has come up with this amazing concept called Storyweaver. Have you read about it yet? Go on and weave a story in as many languages as you want :)
Teaching kids their native language is always hard when it is the minority language in the country! Kids figure out soon enough that they can get by with English or whatever the majority language is, without ever having to use their native "minority" language!
It then falls on us parents to enforce strict rules about talking in the second language.
In my case, we speak Tamil at home, we know Hindi and my 8-year-old daughter has a really good passive understanding of Tamil. In other words, she understands perfectly but won't speak Tamil.
But she is really super interested in learning Hindi as well. But where to start?! Do we start with words, or learning to read and write?
Bal Bhasha is a fabulous little set of flashcards that really helped me, not only with Hindi but also getting my daughter to let go of whatever is inhibiting her from speaking Tamil.
Each card in the set has a couple of questions, it is followed by a card with the answers. We can ask the question to our child in Hindi or any other language we choose! Though the cards have the questions in Hindi and English or Marathi and English, it really works well for any language! The questions are also built around culture, math, science, history and so on. So we get to discuss a wide range of topics and access a wider range of vocabulary that we may not do otherwise! The questions make the language fun and casual without it turning into a worksheet or a chore!
It will be a great way to celebrate the upcoming festival season with some new vocabulary learned!
I really loved these cards. It is a fabulous start to keep language engaging, relevant and fun! Much recommended.
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The Story Truck app is a digital library for children with over 700 books in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati and English. This app is available for both Android and iOS. Users can read the books from their website too.
Image credits: Individual websites and google images
