Perhaps this sounds familiar. It is late afternoon and you are collecting your child from nursery. All day they have played, sung and squabbled over toys in the language of the country you live in. On the way home you ask, in your own language, what they had for lunch. They understand every word, and answer in the language of school. You remind them, they manage one sentence in yours, and then they drift back.

At the weekend the family video-calls home. The grandparents are full of questions; your child smiles at the screen and nods, but when it is their turn to speak they hesitate, then turn to you and carry on in the other language. The call ends sooner than anyone hoped. The grandparents don't mind, but you put the phone down feeling a little heavier.

A Vietnamese family in Japan will probably know this scene, and so, in their own way, will a Korean family in Australia, a Japanese family in Germany or a Chinese family in Canada. What changes is the language spoken at school.

The school language grows, the home language shrinks

Young children pick up the language around them astonishingly quickly. At school they hear it from morning to late afternoon: from the teachers, their friends, songs and cartoons. The language of home is left with dinner, bath time, the minutes before sleep and the weekends.

Little by little, many children reach the point where they understand but no longer speak. It is not their fault, and it is not yours. A child simply uses the language they hear most.

There is a name for the language a family brings with it from far away: a heritage language. It is the language a child receives from home rather than from the place they are growing up. For your child it is how they talk to their grandparents and cousins. It holds the lullabies, the nursery rhymes and the folk tales you heard when you were small. Later on, if they want it, it is also a way into understanding where they come from.

Keeping it does not mean asking a child to choose. What we hope for is that they have one more language, grow up bilingual, and feel at home in both places.

What families often try

Many parents look for a weekend class in their language, run by a community association, a temple, a church or a group of parents. These classes are precious, and they keep going thanks to teachers who care a great deal. But there is not one in every town, and for a three- or four-year-old, a long train ride to class every weekend is a lot to ask.

Some families hire a tutor, or sign their child up for private lessons online. A good teacher who is patient with small children deserves real respect, and their work deserves to be properly paid. Still, the cost adds up month after month and year after year, especially with two or three children in the house, and not every family can afford it.

Others decide to teach their children themselves. But after a day at work, then dinner and bath time, there isn't always energy left to sit down and sound out words letter by letter. Material that suits very young children is hard to find, too, and a lot of the good material comes with a subscription: the month a family stops paying is the month the child's learning stops as well.

Where Dino Kids comes from

Dino Kids began with exactly this problem: helping children keep their mother tongue, and supporting the parents who are working at it. We wanted children to be able to learn their letters and listen to folk tales in their own language, without that learning depending on whether the family had paid that month.

The app covers five languages — Vietnamese, Japanese, English, Korean and Chinese — and you choose, for each child, which ones they see. They are not all equally far along. Vietnamese, Japanese and English have the most: an alphabet board where a child taps a letter to hear it and then an example word, handwriting in stroke order, and folk tales from each culture read aloud, with the sentence being read lit up on the screen. Vietnamese adds phonics that follow Vietnam's Grade 1 curriculum, building each syllable from a first sound, a rime and a tone while the app reads every step aloud. The Japanese tales carry furigana all the way through, so a child who reads hiragana can follow the whole story, and older siblings will find JLPT vocabulary and grammar.

Korean and Chinese are the newest additions and cover less: a Hangul board, or a first set of everyday Simplified Chinese characters with pinyin, plus counting to twenty and writing in stroke order. The English tales are also on our website, if you would like to read them together away from the app.

What we care about most is the parent's voice. For the Vietnamese, Japanese and English lessons, you can record your own voice, so that your child hears the sounds spoken the way your family speaks them, in the accent of the place you come from. You can also read a story aloud yourself, one sentence at a time; once the whole story is recorded, your child hears you instead of the app's voice whenever they open it. Until a story is finished, it keeps playing in the app's voice; in the lessons, too, anything you haven't recorded yet stays in the app's voice, so you can go at your own pace.

Most lessons live on the device and work without a network, which helps on a long flight or on a visit to the grandparents. And because everything sits in one app, a child in Japan can get to know hiragana and sound out Vietnamese words side by side, without giving up one language to make room for the other.

None of this asks a family to pay anything extra. There is no subscription, no in-app purchase, no advertising, and no lesson locked away until someone pays. Digi Dinos covers the cost of the servers, the recorded voices and the content. Dino Kids is the company's contribution to the community, not a source of revenue.

To be honest, an app can only carry part of the load. It cannot replace parents or grandparents, and it cannot replace a classroom with a teacher and other children. What keeps a home language alive, in the end, is the time a parent spends sitting next to their child and talking to them in that language. The app is built to give you a reason for that time: you record your voice for a lesson or read your child a story, and once a week the app tells you what they managed, so you can look at it together.

A few small things to try at home

We are not language experts. These are simply things parents often share with one another; keep whatever suits your family.

  • Keep a regular time for your language. It need not be long: dinner, bath time or ten minutes before bed, as long as it is there every day.
  • Read a story at bedtime. Folk tales carry words that everyday life abroad rarely reaches: the village well, the rice fields, the old woman in the forest, the dragon king beneath the sea.
  • Let your child hear their grandparents. Short, regular calls are usually easier to keep up than long, rare ones. When the grandparents come to stay, or you go home to visit, ask them to read a story aloud and record it for later.
  • Don't push, and don't correct too much. If your child answers in the school language, gently say the same thing back in yours and carry on talking.
  • Praise the attempt. A wobbly sentence with the wrong tone or the wrong ending is still a sentence they tried. What a child needs to learn first is that speaking your language is fun; getting it right will come later.

If this sounds like you

Dino Kids is still being built, a little at a time, and we cannot do it all by ourselves. If you share these worries and would like to help shape the app, we would love to hear from you. You might be a parent who can tell us how your child uses it and where it falls short. You might teach a heritage language to children abroad and know what a young learner needs that the app does not yet have. Or you might write or tell stories for children, have a warm reading voice, translate, draw or write code. Even a small suggestion goes a long way.

Write to us at dinokids@digidinos.com. If you would like to see everything Dino Kids offers, the home page has the full picture. And if the app helps in your house, please tell another family who lives far from home.