Mother-tongue learning at home

Mother tongue, in an Indian home, is often more than one tongue. A child may have Telugu from one parent, Hindi from the other, and English from school. The useful question is not 'Will they be native?' It is 'Which language will still be spoken to them on a Wednesday?'

A plan that names the gaps

Hey Minie can help with English, Hindi, Telugu and Kannada, because those are the languages in the story library. It cannot help with Tamil, Marathi, Bengali, Malayalam, Gujarati, Punjabi or Urdu. The city pages for Chennai, Pune and Mumbai say this in the places where people are most likely to hope otherwise.

One-parent-one-language is a method some families use. It is not the only method, and it fails when the 'Hindi parent' is also the parent who does homework in English at 8 p.m. A story night is easier to keep than a personality. Two nights of Telugu, or Hindi, or Kannada. The child talks to Minie by voice. You talk to the child. A person is still required.

What not to measure

• Do not count mistakes at bedtime.
• Do not switch the whole house for a festival week and call it a method.
• Do not use the fingerprint-locked parent section as a score you read aloud. It is there so you can ask what new words they met, or how much TV they watched.
• Do not tell relatives the app replaced them. It did not.

If you are outside India, read the US, UK and UAE pages. The school language is strong in all three, and the grandparent clock often does not match bedtime. The essay on language abroad is the long version.