Mom, Why Are You Speaking Russian to Us?

My kids fight me on Russian.

“Mom, speak English to us.” “Mom, why are you speaking Russian to us?” Said with the particular exasperation of a 5-year-old and a 6-year-old who have decided, jointly and firmly, that their mother’s first language is an inconvenience.

And here’s the thing they don’t know yet: after nearly thirty years in this country, I struggle to speak it too. The words are there, somewhere in the back of my brain, but they come out slower now. The grammar tangles. I reach for a word I’ve known since childhood and find the English one instead, squatting in the space where the Russian used to live. I am losing my mother tongue in real time, and my children are watching me fumble through it while asking me to please, just, stop.

So I built them books in Russian. And then I built books in fourteen other languages. And this is the story of why.

The hilarious bribery that actually works

Before I get to the meaningful part, I need to tell you the funny part.

My kids have figured something out. They’ve noticed that when they pick up a Russian book — any Russian book — Mama transforms. She stops whatever she’s doing. She sits down. She reads to them with a kind of focused, emotional attention that English bedtime stories don’t always get, because reading in Russian costs me something, and they can feel the effort, and it makes the moment matter more.

They’ve also noticed that this is an excellent time to ask for a new toy.

“Mama, read this one?” they say, holding up a Russian book with innocent eyes. And then, three pages in: “Mama, can we get a new Lego set?”

They’re playing me. I know they’re playing me. I don’t care. They’re hearing Russian.

Why I can’t let this go

Hundreds of studies on bilingual development can’t all be wrong.

The cognitive benefits are well documented — stronger executive function, better attention control, increased cognitive flexibility, delayed onset of age-related cognitive decline. Bilingual children develop enhanced metalinguistic awareness, meaning they understand language itself as a system, which gives them advantages in reading comprehension and literacy that persist well into adulthood.

I know all of this. I’ve read the papers. I can cite the research.

But the real reason I can’t let Russian go isn’t cognitive. It’s personal.

Russian is the language my grandmother spoke to me. It’s the language of the lullabies I heard before I understood what lullabies were. It’s the language of my childhood — the first words, the first jokes, the first stories that made me who I am.

When I speak Russian to my children, I’m not optimizing their executive function. I’m handing them a thread that connects back through generations to people they’ll never meet, in a country they may never fully understand, in a language that carries a thousand years of poetry and heartbreak and humor that English simply cannot replicate.

If I let it go — if I stop speaking it because it’s easier, because they resist, because my own fluency is fading — that thread snaps. And my children will grow up monolingual in a family that used to speak two languages, and they’ll wonder someday why they can’t talk to their relatives, and the answer will be: because Mama gave up.

So I didn’t give up. I built a platform that generates stories in Russian instead.

Twelve languages, three I can understand

Here’s where this gets both ambitious and slightly absurd.

Enchantably now supports fifteen languages. I chose them deliberately — the most spoken languages in the world, plus the ones that matter to the communities I come from. Ukrainian and Russian, because those are my languages. Italian, because it’s one of the great literary traditions. Bengali, because 300 million people speak it and almost no one builds children’s products for them.

Of those fifteen languages, I can understand four. Two fluently — Russian and English — and two well enough to hear when something’s off — French and Spanish. The rest — Mandarin, Hindi, Bengali, Arabic, Urdu, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, German, Korean — I’m trusting the AI, the prosody research, and the hope that someone out there will tell me if it’s not quite right.

And honestly? If you’re reading this and you speak one of those languages and you generate a book and the poem makes you wince — tell me. Please. I will go back and refine it. I want these to be good. Not perfect — I’ve given up on perfect — but good. Good enough that a parent reads the poem out loud and thinks yes, that sounds like my language, that feels like home.

The four I can evaluate? They’re solid. They’re not Pushkin. But I’ll say this: they’re better than at least half the books on my kids’ shelf, and they’re entirely tailored to what I want my kids to read. A poem about their stuffed bear going on an adventure, written in Russian verse, with their names on the page — that doesn’t exist anywhere else. I looked. It’s not on the shelf at the bookstore. It’s not in the library’s Russian section. It’s here, because I built it.

What “not a translation” means

This is the part I’m most proud of, technically, and the part I need to explain because it matters.

When I say Enchantably generates stories in fifteen languages, I do not mean it writes a story in English and then translates it. That’s what most multilingual products do, and the result reads like a translation — stiff, off-rhythm, missing the music of the language. Anyone who’s read a badly translated children’s book knows the feeling. The rhymes don’t land. The meter stumbles. The cultural references feel imported, not native.

Enchantably generates the poem from scratch in the target language. The AI is instructed to compose — not translate — original verse in that tongue.

And here’s where I went deep. I spent weeks learning about prosody — the study of rhythm, stress, intonation, and meter in language. I didn’t know the word “prosody” a year ago. Now I can tell you that Russian verse traditionally favors syllabo-tonic meter, that Spanish children’s poetry often uses octosyllabic lines, that Mandarin poetry has tonal constraints that don’t exist in any European language, and that Arabic verse has a tradition of quantitative meter stretching back centuries.

Each language in Enchantably has its own prosody guidance. The AI isn’t applying English meter to foreign words. It’s following the rhythmic rules of the language itself — or as close to them as current AI can get. Is it perfect? No. Is it meaningfully different from a translation? Absolutely.

I also researched the most beloved children’s authors in each language — the writers whose work shaped how children in that culture experience stories. I studied their style, their rhythm, their approach to rhyme and humor and emotional pacing. The AI is guided toward the feel of those authors, not toward an American storybook sensibility translated into foreign words.

So what you get is not a story written in English and dressed up in your language. It’s a story that — as much as the technology allows — was born in your language. The ethos is yours. The rhythm is yours. The cultural heartbeat is yours.

Is it as good as a native poet writing for your child? Probably not. Not yet. But it’s a starting point that didn’t exist before, and it’s getting better with every iteration.

The families this is really for

I think about the families this matters most to, and they’re not the ones you might expect.

Yes, it’s for the immigrant parent who wants their child to hear their mother tongue at bedtime. That’s me. That’s my story.

But it’s also for the family where the grandparents speak Mandarin and the kids speak English and the gap between them is growing wider every year. It’s for the parent who married someone from another culture and wants their child to carry both languages, even when the dominant one keeps winning. It’s for the family that moved to a new country and is watching their children shed their native language like an old coat, faster than they imagined possible.

It’s for the parent who wants to keep the thread alive.

That parent now has a tool. It’s not a tutor. It’s not a language program. It’s a story — in their language, in their rhythm, with their child’s name on every page — that gives them a reason to sit down and read together in the language that matters. Not because they should. Because the story is good enough to want to.

“Mom, speak English to us”

My kids will probably keep fighting me on Russian. That’s fine. They’re children. They don’t understand yet what they’re being given.

But every night, when I pick up a Russian storybook with their names in it and their bear on the cover and a poem that rhymes in the language my grandmother spoke to me — something small is being deposited. A word here. A sound there. A rhythm they’ll recognize someday, even if they can’t explain why.

And maybe, years from now, they’ll hear Russian somewhere — on a street, in a film, in a song — and something will stir. Not fluency. Not grammar. Just a feeling. The feeling of their mother’s voice, reading to them in the dark, in a language she was losing but refused to let go.

That’s worth every “mom, speak English to us” between now and then.

Enchantably currently supports — tap your language to begin: English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Ukrainian, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Bengali, Arabic, and Urdu.