13 Mistakes Parents Make When They Try to Teach Their Child Bangla

When non-resident Bengali parents try to teach their child Bangla on their own without any institutional support, they sometimes forget to consider some significant issues. Consequently, the learning outcome often does not remain proportionate to the efforts they put into. Let’s look into some of those mistakes and how to avoid them:

1. Starting Bangla Teaching with Alphabets

Often the parents try to imitate the learning process which they underwent in their childhood and start with Bangla alphabets. As the Bangla alphabet is more complicated than English, it often scares the children. Start with some easy vocabularies (like বাবা, মা), try to familiarize the language to the children by speaking Bangla a lot in front of them, use transliteration for flashcards. Once they become a little familiar with how the language sounds, then you can introduce the alphabets to them.

2. Not Taking Assistance from their First Language

It is very hard to teach Bangla in a stand-alone procedure. Additional assistance from their first language is often required. For instance you can explain how to pronounce the alphabet ‘ক’ by comparing it with the English Alphabet ‘K’.

3. Not Introducing ‘Fun’ in the Learning

Usually parents consider language teaching to be a serious process and forget to introduce the fun in the learning. That’s why it makes the learning process tedious and impacts the overall learning efficiency of the child. Explore your children’s interests and make teaching materials based on what excites your child the most. Make the learning process enjoyable and you’ll not have to force them to learn.

You can get plenty of Bangla learning fun content from here https://cutt.ly/HQluEam

4. Not Using Bangla in Day-to-day Lives

Only teaching Bangla for a certain period of time daily is not adequate. If you teach some words and phrases in Bangla while teaching and then go back to English/ children’s first language while interacting with the children, they will never really start using Bangla in their daily conversations. This issue of holding the conversation of day-to-day lives in Bangla cannot be emphasised enough.

5. Not providing Proper Incentives for Children to Learn Bangla

If the children are not provided proper incentives, they lose the motivation to learn Bangla. Every child is different, finding out what motivates your children to learn the most is the most important step in teaching Bangla. Children learn their first language because they need that language to interact with their friends, teachers and acquaintances. Try to find something they’ll need to use Bangla for. For example, your child may have a favorite grandparent or uncle they love to talk to, tell your children that they need to learn Bangla to tell stories to their Grandparents or uncle

6. Not appreciating Reward Mechanism

If the children are not rewarded after achieving any learning goals, their learning process becomes unexciting and plain. Set learning goals and reward the children after achieving each goal. Make the rewards worthwhile, do not just give them things you think they like rather give them things they want most after reaching a target point in their learning.

7. Lack of Practice

The children generally forget very quickly the things they learn. That’s why they need to keep practising. Keep track of what you have taught previously, fix one day every week as a revision day. Avoid using the same process that you used when you first taught a topic. For example, if you taught vocabulary with pictures related to your house for the first time to your child, then when it comes to practising and revising you can use actual furniture and commodities in the home.

You can get a lot of FREE bangla practice materials here https://cutt.ly/HQluEam

8. Language Learning Cannot Succeed without Cultural Knowledge

Another mistake that parents make while trying to teach their children Bangla is that they take the language out of its cultural context. Referencing the culture of the language being taught not only completes the learning but also makes learning meaningful for the children. Familiarising the cultural aspects works as a means through which the language becomes alive; otherwise the language is nothing but alphabets, words and grammar to them.

9. Not Providing Appropriate Exposure to Bangla Speaking Environment

The basic sentence pattern in English is subject +verb + object (SVO), whereas in Bengali it is- subject+ object + verb (SOV). It’s actually normal for a kid to forget the structure they are not used to it.

Those are the main reasons why NRB kid finds Bangla difficult but it doesn’t mean they can’t learn Bangla. If we can make them interested in Bangla then they will easily improve learning. For increasing their interest we can make them listen to Bangla songs/ poems from an early age, we can use Bangla as a secret language at home which will increase their curiosity for Bangla. Give them more time to earn and teach them slowly, never laugh at them when they use the wrong bangle sentence structure, it will encourage you to learn Bangla. Because in reality, Bangla is not a hard language to learn, but it’s the sweetest one!! Just give your kid enough time to learn and they will really enjoy speaking it.

10. Not Remaining Flexible

Children prefer different things from time to time and that’s why the teaching techniques and materials should be updated accordingly. The teaching process should maintain their learning pace as well.

11. Lack of Consistency

Parents need to remain consistent with their Bangla teaching so that any study-gap is not created. This is a frequently made mistake by most parents due to their busy schedule. Even if you cannot remain present while teaching, try to prepare a quiz or a simple game for them to take part on their own.

12. Not Realizing that even a Slow Progress is One Kind of Progress

Do not make the mistake of giving up teaching Bangla to your child if the child is making less progress than you hoped. Please stick to the teaching and you’ll see progress sooner or later. Children will learn the language at their own pace, not at the pace the parents decide.

Those are the main reasons why NRB kid finds Bangla difficult but it doesn’t mean they can’t learn Bangla. If we can make them interested in Bangla then they will easily improve learning. For increasing their interest we can make them listen to Bangla songs/ poems from an early age, we can use Bangla as a secret language at home which will increase their curiosity for Bangla. Give them more time to earn and teach them slowly, never laugh at them when they use the wrong bangle sentence structure, it will encourage you to learn Bangla. Because in reality, Bangla is not a hard language to learn, but it’s the sweetest one!! Just give your kid enough time to learn and they will really enjoy speaking it.

13. Language Learning is not a Short-term Commitment

Expecting to see results overnight is not practical. No matter how gifted your children are, teaching a new language is a very complicated process. It becomes complicated and stretchy in the case of Bangla especially as opposed to English as there are numerous researches held on how to teach English as a second/ foreign language but there are limited researches and resources on how to teach Bangla. Moreover, even with the proven methods it takes years to see results.

Bangla learning and teaching in an English speaking environment is usually motivated by emotions that the parents feel towards the language. The task is difficult but achievable. I hope this writing helps in the process.