012: Interview With Olga Mecking | European Mama

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

Olga Mecking is the founder of European Mama – a blog that focuses on expat life and raising trilingual children. Olga blogs about her experiences on her site and sometimes contribute articles to other websites as well. She is a Polish mother living in the Netherlands with her German husband and three children. She also works as a translator and communicator in intercultural communication.

We talk about how she was raised as a bilingual by her parents, their family language portrait, and how she raises her trilingual kids. She also shares with us what system she uses on her kids when it comes to language learning. We also talk about the importance of quality time and giving more input when it comes to teaching your kids another language.

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

00:21 Introduction Olga Mecking – founder of European Mama

2:00 Olga’s family language portrait – how she was raised as a bilingual

4:10 Switching languages – was it hard to speak Polish and German?

6:00 Olga on learning how to speak English

9:15 Learning more languages like Hebrew and Dutch.

11:56 Her family language portrait now – her kids on trilingual learning

13:00 Olga on miscommunications of language speaking and translating between her and her husband

15:00 Polish community and immersion schools

17:50 Difference between Polish and Ukrainian language

19:00 Quality time and input with language learning

22:36 Multilingual learning plan isn’t working?

25:20 Discussing the one parent, one language system

26:39 Tracking the time a child spends on listening and learning the language

30:19 What language does her children speak to each other?

34:00 Keeping the heritage language and translations

35:17 Culture differences in living in different countries

37:41 Multicultural cooking with Olga

42:45 Challenges of raising multilingual kids

46:20 Olga’s advice on raising a multilingual child

Items mentioned in this episode:

The multilingual parenting dilemma

Always speak your mother tongue with your child

The importance of quality time in multilingual families – and my struggles with it

Who can be bi- or multilingual?

How does it feel like to raise multilingual children

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