006: Annabelle Humanes: One Family – Four Languages. How?

Bilingual Kids Rock Podcast: Raising Multilingual Children, Multicultural Living, Growing Up With Multiple Languages.

On this episode of Bilingual Kids Rock Podcast, we talk with Annabelle Humanes, founder of the blog – Piri-Piri Lexicon. She’s a French language researcher married to a Portuguese and they reside in Germany with their daughter, LJ. They speak 4 languages at a daily basis and their aim is to raise their daughter to be a young global citizen.

Why Piri-Piri Lexicon? According to Annabelle, it sums up her family quite well. The lexicon part is because she spent 4 years of her student life researching bilingual children’s vocabulary development for a PhD and carried on further research on the topic of word acquisition. Piri-piri is a chilli brought to Africa by the Portuguese (aka a multicultural chilli!). It is used in a delicious and simple Portuguese dish (piri-piri chicken – a family favorite) and represents her family’s love for (spicy) food and P’s love for cooking.

In this episode, here’s what we’ll cover:

• 2:35 Annabelle’s Family Language Portrait and what language her family speaks

• 4:30 Annabelle talks about her daughter’s language learning and going to a Bilingual school.

• 6:30 Discussing the article “How much a child should be exposed to a minority language?”

• 10:10 Clues to see if a child gets enough exposure to another language

• 12:26 Developing Bilingual Lexicon

• 15:06 Language learning for the children

• 16:00 Language Delay for Bilingualism

• 17:15 Difference between Bilingual and Monolingual kids

• 20:30 Speech Theraphy and Specialists – Dealing with Difficulty in Language Learning

• 22:10 Annabelle’s Books on Amazon: Bilingual Lexicon and Research

• 23:00 Dealing with the difficulty of learning Portuguese for her daughter while her husband is traveling

Items mentioned in this episode include:

• The developing Bilingual Lexion
• www.thepiripirilexicon.com