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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]All of my friends have their children learning home language, and I feel terrible my children (3 and 6) only speaks and understands English.

I am trilingual and DH is bilingual. I can speak, write and understand my home language but I don’t know how to teach. Due to covid, all nearby learning school platforms are doing virtual, and not in person. I wish they can run in person, so I can enroll my kids immediately. Both of my children have mild speech disorder that doing weekly speech therapies, in English. That is my biggest reason why home language has not been introduced with full force by me when they were young. I don’t have confidence to teach to my American born children here. Many of my friends pay someone online to do virtual learning, should I copy them? But their children can speak and understand some before they started lessons, and my children are at ground zero level. My kid show zero interests as of now.

How does your children learn home language here, through parents, classes (virtual or physical), at will or by force? 
[/quote]

We are a trilingual household (Russian, English, Arabic).  We stick to the "one parent, one language" rule - the kids get Russian only from me, and Arabic only from him.  It's hard and you have to find a childcare setup that conforms to your linguistic goals.  Our kids were in a Russian language-only care until 1st grade - nanny+grandma first, immersion preschool next.  English does invade once they start grade school so be prepared for this.  Please do also understand this effort involves costs - most of all, in your time, effort, insistence, feeling of exclusion, and last on the list, financial.  You are lucky you live in an area (assuming you are in DC/MD/VA) where we have lots of foreigners and lots of communities.  You can get pretty much any material you want online in whatever language.  We get regular book shipments from Russia and I've read to my kids until they were close to nine.  The older two are fluent now, let's see what will happen to #3.  They take Arabic online as we weren't able to find a good tutor in person.

If it's really important to you, just make a commitment and start.  Languages for children need to be experienced rather than taught formally. [/quote]

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