Family5 min read
Five ways to teach Mende at home
You do not need to be fluent, and you do not need a lesson plan. Here is what actually works in an ordinary week with a small child.
Most advice about raising a child in a heritage language assumes you are fluent, patient, and have half an hour a day. Very few families are all three at once.
Here is what works in an ordinary week.
1. Pick one moment, not one hour
Choose a single repeating moment and make it the language moment. Bath time. The walk to the car. Sorting laundry.
The repetition is doing the work, not the duration. A child who hears the same five words at the same moment every day will have them within a fortnight. A child who gets a thirty-minute lesson on Sunday usually will not.
2. Use the words you already say a hundred times
Start with greetings, counting, and the words you use to manage a small child's day — come, sit, more, finished, well done.
These are not the words in a beginner textbook. They are better, because you are going to say them anyway. Every one you switch is free practice.
3. Let grandparents do the heavy lifting
If there is a fluent speaker in the family, put them on a video call and get out of the way.
Children learn language from people they want to talk to. A grandparent who lights up when the child says one word is worth more than any app. Ask them to name what they are doing rather than to test the child.
4. Do not correct. Repeat correctly.
If your child says the word wrong, resist the correction. Just say it back the right way, in a normal sentence, and carry on.
Correction makes a child cautious, and a cautious child stops trying. Repetition gives them the right version without the sting.
5. Accept the mixed sentences
Your child will mix languages in a single sentence. This is not confusion, and it is not failure. It is what every bilingual speaker on earth does, including fluent adults.
Let it happen. The languages sort themselves out.
One honest note
There will be a stretch — often around the time they start school — where your child answers in English no matter what you speak. This is normal, it is about fitting in rather than about you, and it very often reverses in the teenage years.
Keep speaking. Being understood is enough. They are still listening.