Heidi, over at the Adopting A Sibling blog, put up a smart, seven-part post on 10 tools for bridging language issues with an internationally adopted child a while back. It is a wonderfully informative read and it brought back a lot of the tricks I used with my two kids.

First a word of background. I speak five languages in addition to English (French, Italian, German, Japanese and Russian, ranked in order of fluency from great to terrible). I started learning foreign languages in elementary school, through an immersion method that seems, alas, to have passed out of fashion in many schools. It worked basically like this: From the moment the teacher entered our classroom, she spoke nothing but French, or Italian, or whatever. No translations, but plenty of charades and games. It was a method that worked in spades: People I went to school with, even those who don't now use foreign languages, can still recall the basics they learned in those classes.

My older son, whom I adopted at 18 months, had no verbal language skills in Russian. (He did clearly understand what was being said to him in Russian.). So I immediately immersed him in English. No baby talk, just good mainstream English. I kept up a running commentary on everything we saw or did during our time in Vladivostok, so much so that I can remember the Russian guard at the U.S. consulate looking at us quizzically and asking, "He understands English already?"

In searching out a daycare center back home, I stumbled upon one run by a Russian emigre. The toddler room teachers were both Russians, and we agreed that they would speak mostly Russian to my son in the early months, while I kept up the English banter at home. By the end of his sixth month in America, my older son's speech was as good as two-year-olds who had lived here their whole lives.

I had to take a slightly different approach with my younger son, whom I adopted just short of his fifth birthday. I made a point of mastering what I came to call "baby don't-do-that Russian" from a phrase list my agency had given me: "Hold my hand", "stay here", "don't touch", etc.

But I also enlisted the help of every Russian or Russian-speaker I could find in my town. The shoe repairman, a native of Khabarovsk near the Arctic circle on Russia's Pacific coast, patiently translated my explanation of why it was a bad idea to grab the dog's fur and food. A Ukrainian psychologist gave my son the basics of nursery school. A St. Petersburg-born grandmother helped us talk about family and relatives.

When we were all together as a family, though, i reverted to my older pattern: Non-stop talk in English. Just as Heidi advocates, we used games, charades and general silliness to get our points across. The result so far: Vocabulary and verbal language skills that have stunned his kindergarten class' speech therapist, who thought he had been here two years, not just 14 months.