Our second and final guest episode of Season 1 — and the one that will carry you into Season 2. Anna is a lifelong friend who has been raising her three children in English, American Sign Language, and Mandarin for nearly nine years. She is Mexican, Spanish is her first language, and none of the languages she's teaching her children are her native tongue. In this conversation she shares what each of her three children has taught her, what the trickiest age really is (and when it gets easier), the sandwich rule for mixed-language social situations, and what she would do differently — which turns out to be the most honest advice in the whole season.
What We Cover
- Anna's story: homeschooled from age 6, self-taught English through audio immersion, six months in England at 16 that changed everything
- Why she and her husband decided to raise their children multilingually before they were even married
- What each child has taught her: the firstborn pioneer, the middle child still in process, the youngest beneficiary
- The pandemic effect: her firstborn at 2½ was in total English immersion and arrived at playgrounds expecting everyone to speak English
- How siblings speak to each other in English by choice — and why that changes everything for the younger ones
- The sandwich rule: how to address children who speak different languages in the same moment
- What metalinguistic awareness looks like at age 5 (asking for vocabulary mid-conversation) and age 8 (carrying a word all day until she can ask for the translation)
- Why ages 3–5 are the trickiest — and why after 8 both languages are fully there
- Emotional conversations in the target language: why staying in it for the hard ones is the most important thing she'd do differently
- ASL and Mandarin: how to introduce a language you don't speak natively
- Where to find her real-life multilingual family content
Follow Ann's journey: https://www.instagram.com/ann.sprinkles
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