In an earlier blog I wrote that we are together with people who do not all speak the same language. We are currently together with Germans, Spaniards and Dutch and there is also some Portuguese to be found somewhere. There is not one language that we all speak. So in FamiliaFeliz you can hear a mix of German, Spanish, Dutch and English all day long.

For the little things this is not so bad. With our hands and feet we manage a lot. So today when I got stung on my little finger by a wasp, it didn’t take much for me to ask our fellow FamiliaFeliz visitors in the garden, who speak German and Spanish, for help. (thanks again! I know they are reading this 😉 )

Fortunately, for the more complicated things such as explaining things that happened, we have Google translate. You speak a text in your own language, and he translates it into the other language. I’m probably the last one to find out about this, but you can even take a picture of a text that Google then can translate. I’m not a fan of Google, but in this situation it has often been our salvation.

Apart from some frustration of not yet understanding a language sufficiently, this environment is extremely good for learning other languages.

And I also see that a language ultimately does not have to be a barrier with the children in FamiliaFeliz. They took some time to get used to one another, but they have now found each other. This makes the whole experience, at least for our boys, a lot more fun. It is easier to express yourself to another child in a language that is not your native language than it is sometimes to an adult.

There are so many ways you can express yourself. If you are open to it, then learning another language is a real gift. And it is especially nice when the new language you are learning is the language of art.