(I wrote this in 2016 but never hit the Publish button. I’m hoping some stuff might still be relevant. I’ve embellished with Emojis)
https://twitter.com/albertofaci

The Master Plan

It wasn’t about becoming rich, but rather to learn a bit more about online businesses that sell physical goods. I thought I’d create an online store selling geek T-shirts for IT people. I decided that the jokes should be geeky enough to be appealing to my niche, but not too so I wouldn’t risk that only a small portion of the audience would understand them.

Tribe identified? Is the product niche enough? Check ✅

I had…

Living in an area of London where there are plenty of multicultural families, and having children of nursery and school age, I see how families succeed and fail to different degrees in achieving multilingualism.

In this article I introduce 7 common patterns I’ve seen when things start going south. They are presented as quotes I’ve heard from peers over time.

I’ll use a prototypical family of an English-speaking country with a English-speaking father and a mother who is not a native English speaker. They have one son.

1. “I can’t find any children’s books in my language”

It’s inevitable that most of the children’s books available in the shops and…

Being in a trilingual environment (Spanish and Russian indoors and English outdoors), there’s always the question of what language they kids should watch the cartoons.

(I’m skipping the debate on whether kids should watch cartoons at all. Let’s assume they’re going to watch them. So the question is in what language?)

Following our policy of maximising exposure to our languages in the early years as much as possible before primary school begins, we decided that our eldest would watch video content preferrably in Spanish or Russian.

Spoon-feeding cultural heritage with cartoons

It naturally started by traditional Russian cartoons — from the 60’s and 70’s —…

I’m in the middle of the trilingualism journey at the moment. To clear things up, I’ll just start as a quick definition, a trilingual child is a child raised in three languages. The most common case, and the one I will cover, is where each parent contributes with their native language (heritage languages) and the host country adds the third language (host language).

Living in a cosmopolitan city like London, it is fairly common to encounter families where the parents belong to different nationalities and neither of them is a native English speaker.

In my view, a case of successful…