Unschooling Ivrit

Something that is one of the zanier things I've done is chosen to speak to my kids in Hebrew despite it not being my native language.  I don't know some words, my grammar (though improved) is nowhere near perfect, my accent is atrocious, I don't use idiomatic expressions, I speak very slowly, and have trouble conveying sophisticated concepts to them.  They have difficulty understanding Israelis.

On the plus side, they are all comfortable with basic Hebrew.  They will probably easily be able to speak in Israel.  My older two are comfortable in Israel and understand it (though my oldest hesitates to speak).  When they start Chumash, they are familiar with a great deal of the words.  They have a fairly decent basic Hebrew vocabulary that they learned with no pain.

My three little ones can barely read Hebrew yet, so they haven't started skills work inside.  We will see how that emerges.  They are 6th, 4th, and 2nd grade.  My 4th grader has expressed an interest so I hope to try to get started with him.

My second child is something of a polyglot.  She asked for Japanese lessons, which I acquired for her via skype for 3 years, then she asked me to buy her a Japanese textbook, which I did, and then she traveled to Japan twice.  She took a college course in Russian (got an A, her first college course), and she is teaching herself Dutch.

My oldest (married already) started teaching herself Korean using dualingo and seems to be getting fairly fluent.

I've always kind of wondered how Hebrew language unschooling could work.  Bear in mind that it might work "better" in the case I'm describing because this child has a natural aptitude for and enjoyment of languages.

We put Hebrew font on all of her devices and I text and chat in Hebrew as much as possible. 

I bought her Harry Potter in Hebrew at her request and I bought her R' Winder workbooks for older kids at her request.  To my knowledge she has not used them whatsoever.

I did read about some book which was supposed to be AMAZING about acquiring language by an opera singer who needed to learn German and Italian for operas or something like that.  I bought her the book and she did read a lot of it and said it was incredibly helpful.

She went to a Zionist camp with actual Israelis and she joined their whatsapp group and they were thrilled that she can communicate in Hebrew. 

She started translating songs they shared with her.  Many times a day she asks me what phrases mean.

She joined something called discord which has sections for all sorts of interests and went into the languages section and into the Hebrew section and is chatting with people there.

What is interesting from the standpoint of unschooling is that language acquisition looks NOTHING like it does in an academic setting.  You can be "behind" for years and then quickly spend hours and months on it and acquire tremendous skills.  The acquisition is fun and exciting.  There is a risk it will not be acquired to the level the parent would wish for.  But in unschooling, we have trust that knowledge is fun and useful and able to be acquired at any time, at any age, as needed or wanted.