It's been a long time!

I haven't been posting on this blog for about a year and a half, and a lot of changes happened since then. Sasha speaks both English and Russian more fluently now. And his current "deal" is a lot of pretend play. He is going to be 3 in something like 40 days, and at this point, his Russian sentences became more complex. He uses structures with words because, so that and which. Our efforts to keep TV time to a minimum continue. We allow occasional cartoons. 95% of cartoons he watches are in Russian, with just a couple of English language cartoons ("Chicka Chicka Boom Boom" and "Sid the Science Kid"). 

Maintaining Russian play dates for him proved to be very difficult, in part because every family has a different approach to raising their child bilingual. Some families speak only one language with a child, and it is English. Some families utilize a lot of English media. Some families encounter some challenges (for example, speech delay or lack of second language services) and give up. 

Truthfully, even with our achievements so far, it's not that easy to maintain both languages at the same level. One always falls behind. When we travel to Russia (which we did this summer and last summer), Sasha's Russian gets significantly better than his English. When we spend more time with Sasha's American grandparents or if we attend a lot of classes, then his English gets better. 

I think the most important thing in raising a bilingual child is being consistent and providing quality time and quality media in both languages. Of course, that's not easy. Even if you are trying to raise a child with English-Spanish in America, there are significantly less Spanish language media at your local library than those in English. There are less opportunities to use the second language and to learn anything new in second language. There are less people in your community that speak the second language that you are trying to teach your child.

So, in the future posts, I will try to highlight some of the stuff that we did to encourage language development in our son and some of the questions that my acquaintances posed that have something to do with speech.