Ivan Kuzmenko watches warily every day as his daughter Dina swims further into the pop culture ocean around her and speaks English with more ease.

The family immigrated to the United States a year ago. Kuzmenko fears that every month Dina spends in her new country could weaken her grasp of Russian and Hebrew, which she learned growing up in Israel with Russian parents.

Holding onto those languages will be an uphill climb, especially as Russia and Israel become more irrelevant to Dina's daily life, her father, an Albany resident, said.

Thousands of immigrant parents around the Bay Area face the same dilemma and are tackling the problem in a uniform way: They have set up after school and weekend classes in churches, living rooms and elsewhere, teaching their children the languages and traditions of their home countries.

Parents are trying to protect their ability to communicate meaningfully with their children, said Kuzmenko, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley.

"No matter how well (parents) learn a language, you can't transmit emotion that well," Kuzmenko said. "If she forgets Russian, we will lose an important connection to her".

Of the 10 nations that sent the most immigrants to the United States in 1998, at least half are represented by schools large and small around Bay Area teaching children of immigrants the stuff of ethnic identity.

On every given afternoon, the schools bring together whose parents come from China, India, the Philippines, Tibet, Russia and Vietnam, among other countries.

Those parents share a common fear that the economic and po,litical freedoms they enjoy in the United states will be offset by a loss of cultural heritage, especially among their children, said Som Konar, who organizes classes in Oakland teaching Bengali culture and language to South Asian immigrant children.

"The parents see their kids growing up in this culture and, sometimes, they can't relate to it," Konar said. "To put things in perspective, they want their kids to know where they come from. Nobody should forget where they come from."

The main priority for parents is to pass down their native languages, said Yelena Glikman, who co-founded the Berkeley Russian School where Dina is a student.

The school holds classes four days a week in a space leased from the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists. On Sunday afternoons, a school run by Tibetan refugees fills the rooms.

On a Wednesday afternoon early May, the Students patiently listened to their teacher read in Russian from a vocabulary and grammar primer. During the two-hour class, hardly anyone spoke English.

"Language is so huge," Glikman said. "It's an opportunity to know there's another culture, in our case, a huge European culture with lots of writers and lots of scientists and a whole country that speaks this great language."

Just as important for many schools is teaching aesthetic aspects of ethnic identity such as music and visual arts.

At the Contra Costa Chinese School in Pleasant Hill, half the curriculum consists of classes run by volunteer parents teaching martial arts, Chinese painting and other cultural disciplines.

The school is one of the biggest of its kind in the East Bay with 600-plus students using 28 classrooms at Diablo Valley College four hours every weekend.

On a recent Saturday, Chinese-American parents and children filled the courtyard of the college's liberal arts building playing Chinese chess, registering for classes and chatting in groups.

To announce the end of class periods, parents walked through the building's hallways clanging hand-held bells.

Beyond classroom instruction, the school gives area Chinese a place to meet and greet each other at the end of the week, said Daniel Chao, a Pittsburg resident whose two daughters attend the school.

The instruction day often carries over into dinners at each other's houses. Recent arrivals to the region show up to introduce themselves to the community.

"I've made a lot of friends here," Chao said. "It's like church."

In fact, many ethnic churches such as the Korean Presbyterian Church of the Tri-Valley run their own language and culture schools, housing worship services and language instruction under one roof, said the Rev. Myung Lee of Pleasanton.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to the schools' successes are the children themselves, many of whom said they could think of more exciting ways to spend their weekends than learning grammar and vocabulary in a stuffy classroom.

"I want to learn Chinese, but I don't like going to school on Saturdays," said 11-year-old Justin Chew of Lafayette. "It means you can't go to friends' birthday parties"

After studying at the Russian school for five years, 13-year-old Michael Johnson recently stopped attending because, he said, he had grown too old for the school and the homework load from his full-time school had increased.

Johnson said his grasp of Russian has slackened, although his appreciation for languages has grown.

"Up until now, I really wanted to drop the Russian classes," the Piedmont resident said. "But I'm learning other languages now, and knowing Russian has helped me with that. I understand how tenses and grammar work."

The fight against such student indifference fuels much of the schools' agendas.

Parents fill classes with games, songs and birthday parties, hoping to keep children entertained.

They plan group trips back to their native countries to get children excited about where their parents came from, Konar said.

The goal is to give children an appreciation of their cultural heritage that will survive their eventual assimilation in mainstream American culture Konar said.

"With my 10-year-old and 11-year-old, it's very hard to get them to go to school when none of their friends speak the language," Konar said, "In that context, they don't find the relevance. But we hope that when they're older they will; find the relevance."