If there are two languages in your house, bedtime is the easiest place to give the quieter one some room. A child who resists speaking their grandmother's language at the dinner table will often happily listen to a story in it, because listening asks nothing of them — and because the story is the same story they love in the other language.

Why bedtime

Language sticks best when it arrives with feeling attached, and nothing in a child's day has more feeling attached than the story before sleep. It is also the one time the language will not be competing with anything: no television, no friends, no homework in the other language. A story in the second language, every night, is a small daily dose delivered at the moment it is most welcome.

The same story in both

The single most useful thing you can do is read a story the child already knows. A story they have heard in English, heard again in Spanish, is understood immediately — the words attach to a story that already exists in their head. This is the reason every story here can be switched between languages: the child picks the story, and the language is a choice made after, not a different story.

Alternate nights, or alternate weeks, or let the child choose. What matters is that the second language turns up regularly and is never the punishment version of the story.

If you do not speak it well yourself

Many parents want a child to keep a language they themselves are losing, or to learn one the parent never had. Narration helps here: the story is read in a native voice, the words are shown as they are spoken, and you can sit with it and learn alongside — which children, incidentally, love. You do not have to be the expert in the room for the language to be in the room.

What to expect, and how long it takes

Understanding comes long before speaking, and at bedtime understanding is the whole job. A child who listens to a story in the second language and laughs in the right place is learning it, even if they answer you in the first one. Do not correct at bedtime, and do not ask them to say things back; that is for the daytime, if at all. The story is the dose, not the lesson.

It takes months to notice anything and years to notice everything, which is exactly why a nightly story is the right vehicle: it costs five minutes and it never stops. The families who keep a second language alive are, almost always, the ones who simply kept reading in it.

Where the stories are

The library is available in thirteen languages — English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish and Polish. Each language has its own library pages, and any story can be read or narrated in any of them from the reader.