This is great, hopefully OP can keep it up. I spoke only my native German to our first daughter and it went great but when the second one came around she wanted to have nothing to do with it. "Stop speaking Spanish!" was her reply (all foreign languages were spanish in her estimation) so I slacked off.
Even with my older one I stopped the German when she was a bit older because I didn't want to be the only one having simplistic conversations and I also prefer speaking English myself.
In retrospect I regret my laziness. Some of my German drinking buddies, even the ones with American wives, kept it up and I feel a bit guilty.
Lessons I've learned:
- It's a lot easier when a stay-home parent speaks the foreign language
- Speaking a "useful" foreign language (Spanish, Mandarin) might be easier, especially if there are immersion programs in your town
I advise you not to give up. It's never too late to learn a language (further).
I have two elementary aged kids who are German/English bilingual and have always lived in an English speaking country.
What has worked for us:
- I always speak to them in German -- I'm not the stay at home parent so every word counts
- Media in German (their favorite shows of their choosing -- it's too easy with Netflix and YouTube these days and they watch almost nothing in English)
- Playtime related to these shows' themes is usually in German because the kids assume the characters only speak German
- We participated in a bilingual German playgroup composed of around 10 families in a metro area of one million people -- larger areas no doubt have even better opportunities
- We believe any additional language is useful for opening up a child's mind and making foreign language learning easier in the future
My kids seem to have a good attitude towards being bilingual but maybe that will change as they age. I hope they will find it to be an invaluable gift when they are grown. It certainly is fun to share something special and unique with them.
That's great, keep it up. Mine took German through high school and the oder one got a minor in German in college. The younger is still not that interested in German but they both have both citizenships, hopefully will take advantage later on.
Growing up, my dad didn't speak his native French with me. I did, however, pick up enough from hearing him on the phone every day and visiting Switzerland for a few weeks each year that I could loosely understand it. When I got to high school and started taking French classes it came to me extremely easily. In college I spent a semester in France and after a few weeks felt comfortably fluent, and was told I didn't have a discernible American accent. So ultimately if your kids want to pick it back up they may find it fairly easy in the future.
It's really hard to maintain German in the states, because unless you're in certain parts of rural Pennsylvania, no one else speaks it and it's not really useful for jobs.
But I'm grateful that my parents passed it onto me.
Acquiring that core of the language at an early age is really valuable. Throughout my teens my German was a lot weaker, but once I decided I wanted to get better it was really easy to train myself up by listening to news and podcasts, and setting up regular conversations with native speakers.
Your kids' experiences may turn out to be similar.
I think getting the kid to get familiar with the sounds as early as possible is the critical point.
If they reach a point they recognize all the sounds and properly vocalize, I think we can give them a break and speak what they want. It will never be too late to get deeper into the language and learn to properly speak on their own terms, when they're morivated to do it.
In particular I think it's frustrating both for the kid an the parent to speak a language that look like a dead end, when there is nothing to read/watch in it that the kid enjoys, or friends of their age speaking it too.
Based on my family's history, my guess is that success rates are generally higher for the first kids.
My mom's side of the family is from East Friesland. My maternal grandfather was born in the US, but didn't speak any English when he started school. Grandpa was certainly fluent in English by the time I came along, and I presume he was reasonably fluent in English by the end of grade school. My maternal grandparents were bilingual, but decided to speak "Pig German" at home and let their kids learn English in school. My mom's oldest brother learned English the same way Grandpa did. Mom's older siblings spoke English enough that Mom never really learned to speak German. Grandma and Grandpa would speak to Mom in German, and she'd reply in English.
Though, plenty of German vocabulary made it into Mom's lexicon. I think I was in late middle school or early high school when I realized wunderbar wasn't an English word.
My oldest son is more fluent in Thai than English, where my wife does a good job of speaking almost 100% Thai to the kids. We'll see how the twins do once they start speaking and when the oldest starts going to preschool. My guess is that the oldest will speak primarily English to the twins, making it harder for them to pick up Thai.
One interesting thing is if only one parent speaks the second language then kids will tend to only (obviously) pick up the tendencies of that speaker.
So if a dad then the kid, irrespective of their gender, will pick up dad’s masculine tendencies or if mom her feminine tendencies. (dad may say the equiv of "dude" and mom may say the equiv of "guys", those sorts of things.)
Yeah, it's very context sensitive. My father in law learned Hungarian as his first language in a Hungarian neighborhood in Cleveland. When he went to Hungary decades later they told him he spoke like their great grandparents.
It's good to also talk about failures, so let me tell a failure story. I intended to do this the other way round: I'm a native Spanish speaker with good command of English (officially CEFR C2 level which is the highest recognized in Europe) and I intended to always speak to my son in English so that he could be bilingual (or trilingual, as we also have an additional regional language here).
It was an utter failure. Soon after he was born, I discovered that even though in theory my English skills are good in theory, speaking to him in English would impose an emotional distance. It wouldn't be as natural to express love and affection in English, I felt it would be a barrier between us and I really wanted to be close to my baby, so I gave up.
Then, as the kid grew, and as a plan B, I learned that some parents used the strategy of using English in a specific situation (a given room of the house, time of the day, etc.). I first used it in the kitchen, but then my parents (my mother doesn't speak English) moved to live with us because circumstances, so it became very awkward and I stopped. Then I decided to use it in playgrounds instead. But as my son learned to talk and express himself better, he started to get angry. He would say "¡En castellano! ¡En castellano!" ("In Spanish! In Spanish!"). I tried to convince him, but he is very stubborn, so I mostly gave up because otherwise he was always angry with me in the playground.
So now (he is 4 years old) I just try to tell him things about English sometimes, read some stories in English to him (but not too many because he gets angry and demands "en castellano"), and things like that. I hope he will still learn English, like I did, but the bilinguality plan failed.
Big respect and kudos to those who manage to keep it up!
Thanks for sharing your perspective! I was in a similar boat with wanting to speak in the desired language, but also not being close with my child. Now, I just read books in other languages and say phrases to them occasionally to prime their brain to the sounds and ease learning in the future (if they do choose).
In college I remember hearing many stories from bilingual children whose parents spoke exclusively one language at home while the child spoke English at school, etc. Anecdotally, I recall many of these people saying they were less likely to open up to their parents (or, parent, if it was only one exclusively speaking the language). Many cited it was because they didn't feel as comfortable in the second language but didn't bother to even try because they knew their parents wouldn't budge on speaking English.
OP, YMMV and your daughter is only 2 so I'm sure it's fine for now, but it's also important to consider that as she grows into a teenager she may come to resent Spanish. As that happens you might want to allow her to ease off and speak to you in whatever she feels most comfortable with, for the sake of your own relationship. And remember: no matter what the outcome, you're already doing amazing work by preparing her brain to explore languages on her own in the future!
This is a totally aside but as someone attempting to learn Spanish as an adult I was curious about the translation from "castellano" to "spanish" (rather than using "espanol"). I had assumed that it referred to the Catalan language but based on some searches it sounds like maybe it _can_ refer to a particular dialect of Spanish but can also just refer to the Spanish language in general. Do i have that right? Language is fascinating!
Originally it meant the specific dialect of Castilla, a region of Spain, but nowadays the term is used to refer to the Spanish language in general. Unless you are talking about history, "castellano" and "español" are synonyms and people understand them interchangeably and use one or the other depending on where they are from. Here is a map:
I am from Galicia, that red corner in northwestern Spain, so "castellano" is the most common term here.
The division within Spain makes sense, by the way: regions that have strong official regional languages say "castellano", because of course Galician, Catalan, etc. are also Spanish languages. So when you speak two languages, both with their origin in Spain, it makes less sense to call one of them español (Spanish). Note however that this doesn't mean that choosing to say one or the other is a political statement at all (or at least, the overwhelming majority of people wouldn't consider it so), things just evolved that way.
As to why some Latin American countries ended up saying "español" and others "castellano", I have no idea, to be honest.
castellano (etymologically) is the equivalent of the English word Castilian, which can refer to the variety of Spanish spoken in central / northern Spain. Catalan is a distinct Romance language.
I'm curious where you are living while trying this and what language you speak with your spouse.
I'm German and have a foreign spouse living in Germany. I speak English with my spouse, work mostly in English and spend most of my free time using English. For neither of us English is the native language though.
I guess it's a dramatically different experience if you try to teach your child a language that's not used in the household and not used in the country. E.g. me speaking German with my child in Germany, while we use English as the common language, should be a lot easier than my spouse trying to teach a language to our child that's not spoken in the country.
This is all theoretical for me as kids are still a few years away, but a question I have been wondering about in a long time.
I live in Spain. I use English a lot at work (maybe 50% of my communication at work is in English) but not with my wife, and it's not used in the country. I suppose it's an important factor, indeed.
My wife is from Mexico, and Spanish is her native language. We had two kids, both of whom we put in bilingual pre-school, and she spoke to them mostly in Spanish when they were alone. Now that they're both grown, our son speaks far better Spanish than our daughter. Why? Well, it's pure speculation, but most of their Mexican cousins are boys (one girl who's much older than our daughter) while most of their American cousins are girls, so when we went to visit family our son went off and played with the Spanish speaking boys while our daughter found something neutral to do.
Some kids are just better at language than others.
My sister's kids are 5 and 8. The girl (5) speaks extremely well in French, and can carry conversations in English, the boy (8) speaks well in French and knows the basic stuff (numbers, colors) in English.
I personally learned English watching Pokemon as a kid, then transitioned to reading English books, but didn't speak English conversationally until I started working at 20.
> Some kids are just better at language than others.
Not really, huge number of people of living in India can speak two or three languages. Their own state's language which they speak at home, Hindi and English which they learn in school and talking to their friends.
Are you going to say that Indians are better at languages compared with other countries or its easy to pick up languages when you are exposed to them at a young age.
Being better at language doesn't mean you have a monopoly. Some kids will learn language easier than others, but it's not impossible for kids who struggle learning to eventually learn it.
Being bilingual myself (Spanish native, English learned) I always wonder why so many Americans/Brits do not speak Spanish as their second language, or any second language for that matter.
Now I live in Europe, and here it is very common for people to know 3 or 4 languages.
Being able to communicate on any other language is so great.
Most people learn languages for a reason. English is the global language now, so a lot of people learn it, native English speakers already speak the global language. The U.S. has a sizeable amount of native Spanish speakers, so it also has a fairly sizeable amount of native-English speakers that can speak Spanish with some degree of proficiency. Probably more than most European’s learn minority languages in their countries. I don’t think I’ve met any people from Madrid that study Catalan or Basque just to speak with the minority of people there who speak those languages.
> I don’t think I’ve met any people from Madrid that study Catalan or Basque just to speak with the minority of people there who speak those languages.
Can confirm. I'm currently living in Catalonia. I don't speak Catalan, only English and Spanish.
My employer is based in Catalonia. They pay for English classes for any employees that want to take them. But also, they have zero interest in paying for Catalan classes for the few of us that don't speak it, and I have zero interest in learning it during my free time when I could be using that free time to learn a more useful language instead.
But the higher ups travel a lot between continents just "to meet people in person", so there's that.
I think it really comes down to the proximity to areas that speak that language. I can travel 100s of miles in every direction from my home in the US and only find English speakers. If there was a town that spoke Spanish 50 miles away, I may consider picking it up. Not many Europeans speak Chinese, why do you think that is?
A coding challenge for someone with more GIS knowledge than I have: use the dataset behind this map https://hub.arcgis.com/maps/847cabe2dfc64f92918f2c282e3cedfb (number of households where Spanish is the primary spoken language by census tract) and see if you can find a location in the United States where you can travel 100s of miles in any direction without encountering a Spanish speaker.
Yup, why should I learn it? I simply have too few occasions to interact with someone who speaks Spanish but not English that it would have been quite a waste of effort to learn.
As an adult it's really hard to pick up a language to be conversational. I tried, it's alot of dedication.
Then I went to Mexico, no one understood me. I guess I have an accent or issues with pronunciation. If I did ask a question, I didn't understand the answer. Everyone just spoke English.
> I always wonder why so many Americans/Brits do not speak Spanish as their second language
I don't know about America, but for Britain:
* Spanish is one language of many, rather than "the other language" like it is in America. It's not even the closest country. French is more popular by far (the standard languages in school are French and German).
* It's extremely unlikely that someone from the UK would spend any significant time in Spain while growing up. Maybe one or two family holidays, but those are expensive, and it's unlikely that you'd always go on holiday in the same country anyway. It's simply not enough to motivate learning the language. Imagine if you went to Russia for a week once when you were young. Would you learn Russian? Of course not.
I had never been to Spain until my 20s. It's not at all uncommon. In fact I had only been to the continent maybe 4 times before uni. Also not uncommon. It doesn't help that the government has criminalised term time holidays. A family holiday in Europe is a huge luxury for most people.
* Like it or not, English is the lingua franca of the modern world. If you're not a native English speaker and you are going to learn another language, it's pretty obvious that you're going to learn English in most circumstances. Think about programming - it's common for programs to be written in English even if all of the authors are native speakers of a different language. If you are a native English speaker which language should you learn? It's far less obvious. That has certainly led me to not be so motivated to learn another language.
I guess Chinese would probably be the obvious choice, but that's extremely difficult and I'm unlikely to ever actually go there...
Many Brits were taught a second language at school (11-16, some starting earlier) but there was very little opportunity to use it outside school, so most did the bare minimum and never continued with it.
I learned French and German at school but they are both very rusty. I’ve since picked up very rusty Spanish. All 3 enough to survive in bars/restaurants and find my way around a new place (eventually) but getting better is on my big long list of things to do.
> You could just jump on a train for 35 euros and be in France in a few hours
So first off, you're assuming that they live in London, as that is the only place with a direct train link to France. Second, the Eurostar website has ticket prices "from £39" which equates to €45. But that's the "from" price. Looking at all availability up to the end of October, there is one day where you can get a £63 ticket, another day where you can get an £86 ticket and all other days are £97 or over. So just "jumping on the train" isn't the cheap carefree jaunt you're making it out to be. The average full time salary in London is £37,000[1] and average rent in London is a staggering £31,524[2]. Those numbers only work because a lot of people are house sharing - it is impossible to live in the UK on £5476, especially in London. That one way ticket to France is approximately 1/7 of the average Londoner's weekly wage.
Living in London is horribly expensive, but being so close, European travel from the UK is often similar in price to travel within the UK. As well as Eurostar there are many cheap flights and both can be similar to the costs of train travel within the UK.
Brexit has sunk the pound so the costs of holidays abroad will be relatively more expensive now, but as kids we often took summer holidays in France because it cost less than going somewhere in the UK.
I get that but, unless you're earning £100k+/year, hopping on the train to France every weekend to go practice your French is prohibitively expensive and not realistic
Doing it every weekend would be prohibitively expensive, but then so would taking the train to Manchester or anywhere else a similar distance within the UK.
Now living in the west coast of the US I really miss the freedom to visit so many different places for so little, whether that be cheap Eurostar fares or cheap budget airline flights.
How expensive is plane travel in the US compared to the EU? The language won't change, but the variety of the US is pretty immense. You could hop on a plane from LA and be in the Texas desert, or the peaks and snow in Colorado, or the Great Lakes, or the swamps in the South. And even leaving the States, tropical islands of the Bahamas are only 5 hours away, Canada is three or four, and Mexico is even closer. I would have expected air travel to be cheaper relatively speaking in America than Europe, especially with the higher salaries. The environmental impacts of all the flying aren't great though obviously.
Where budget airlines exist in the US the fares are comparable, they just fly far fewer routes than in Europe so you often end up paying standard airline prices.
The variety of the US is immense, but its size is immense too! San Francisco-New York is three quarters the distance of London-New York and the western half of the US is practically empty other than the coast.
Looking at my old email receipts I have a lot of £50 each way tickets from RyanAir and EasyJet. My last trip to Mexico was $200 each way (though that was at least twice the distance, Mexico is huge too!)
No need for a train. I could find conversational French/Spanish/German really easily where I live now in London. I have at least 5 native speakers of each of those languages who are friends and live within a mile of me. Right now it is just laziness.
Finding local language communities locally might be harder in less cosmopolitan areas but it just takes a bit of effort.
As an 11-16 year old learning those languages at school it was a lot harder to do so.
I call this the "I don't understand why Europeans don't go for lunch in Paris" puzzlement. I've had variations of this conversation with many American friends over the years ... :)
Distances just hit differently on their side of the Atlantic.
It’s considerably less tiresome and costly to cover long distance in cars.
I noticed that a 500km ride in France is very long distance. A once in a summer thing. While a 350miles trajectory in the us is something I can do with less friction.
This is a big factor, but living in the US I do miss the cheap flights that made weekend city breaks within Europe cheap and easy. From San Francisco it seems like the only place you can get a similarly cheap flight to is Las Vegas and I've never understood the attraction of gambling...
It seems sensible for Americans to learn Spanish as their second language. British schools used to teach French or German as the main foreign language.
American here - I'm still working on English and it's been a few decades, so I think I might have trouble with another language. I live in South Texas so there are sometimes situations where Spanish is the only language spoken and I can get by well enough with it I suppose. But English gets you pretty far the world over, so we can afford to be lazy about it.
Maybe it depends on where in the US one lives, but speaking decent Spanish has come to be really useful to me pretty frequently. And it's always been very rewarding in those moments when it has. It's not an every day thing, but at least once a week I find myself in a situation where having Spanish was definitely useful, if not required.
That is far less frequent, maybe once a year or so does it feel "required", but then it's been especially rewarding to have it.
In South East Asia is common to speak multiple language too. All my family member can speak at least 4 languages. Most of SEAs can speak at least 2 languages.
I have some friends where the Mom is Taiwanese and the Father is Peruvian. They have a one and a half year old daughter. The father only speaks Spanish to her and the mother only speaks Chinese to her. But neither parent speaks the other’s language, so they talk to each other in English and all their friends and neighbors only speak English. So far the kid seems to prefer Chinese.
Purely guessing here, but the closest connection a one and a half year old usually has is its mother. Fathers only become more "relevant" to them at 2+ years and people outside the family even later. So it would be normal for the kid to pick up the mother's tongue. But it would be interesting to see how this preference evolves in the coming years.
I'm not sure that is it. The mother is an engineer who works a typical 9-5 job in an office and often travels for work. The father works remote and is home all day.
Wow, just learned from the post about OPOL [0], didn't know it was a thing, but at least in our case it worked for 3 languages. My wife and I speak different languages (French and Spanish), we each speak exclusively with that one to our kids. They didn't know English when they started preschool, but it took them a couple of months. Right now they are close to native on all 3. Kids are amazing
We did the same but with German/Swedish/English. Kid learns american english from youtube and movies and the main language in Swedish schools is English anyway... The Swedish teachers are complaining quitely that the youth talk more English than Swedish the last 10 years.
I speak to my kids in Japanese mostly as well as my wife but we also speak to them in English. Both of our kids are considered behind their age group in English.
One of my friends spoke their son in Arabic, his wife spoke to their son in Japanese and they spoke to each other in English. They had to change that because their son wasn't speaking by age 3. Once they started speaking only English all the time, their son did great. Now he can speak all 3 no problem but as the doctor they took him to said "No wonder he isn't speaking, he's not sure what is going on!"
I feel unless if there's an absolute need to speak two languages, I think trying to teach a child two languages is pointless. I say this from the point of view of the other experiences that a child can have, in place of language.
My background is half Chinese and I was forced into language school to learn Chinese and ended up studying Chinese for close to a decade (I even lived in China for a year).
But I never really had a need to use the language, and now I absolutely resent the language. I think a large part of it had to do with the fact that I hated my mother, and so refused to speak to her in general.
Overall I would have been much happier if I'd gone hiking instead or doing something else. Maybe I'd still have a relationship with my mother if my life didn't feel so forced.
Of course, a lot of this depends on the relationship you have with your child. I assume I was just unlucky in the overall scheme of things.
It seems very cruel to the child to force bilingualism for the sake of being bilingual. I was raised speaking 5(!) languages, and over time that has attritioned into speaking only 3, but each language had its purpose: mainly in speaking to a different group of people in my home country, for official documents, or was the language on all the interesting TV shows.
The hard part about a new language, if you intuitively understand the grammar, is vocabulary. The author himself admits that his own vocabulary is not expansive enough, foisting than upon a child can't possibly help. The inability to have deep conversations is deeply harmful: there are many Chinese couples in my home country that raised their children only on English, much to the detriment of their Chinese/Hokkien/Cantonese, and the parent and child are now unable to hold deep conversations about important topics, which led to big disconnects in familial relationships.
I don't think that this will cause long-term harm, but I do think it's a massive waste of time.
There is this obsession with language learning that I've never quite understood in the US. The supposed cognitive benefits have, to the best of my knowledge, mostly failed to replicate, so it only lives on as a popular myth.
I agree, it seems artificial to me. My daughter is bilingual but that's because her mother is German and we live in Germany. When we're all together we speak English, when my daughter and I are alone we speak English, and when I'm not around they speak German. When we're around Germans we speak German. That's how things just naturally unfolded. If our daughter replies in German during an English conversation we don't force her to speak English.
We have an interesting situation: We live in Germany as a couple of German and Korean native speakers, but mostly speak English and Korean with each other. It'll fall to me to speak German to our daughter - we're a few weeks away -, which I haven't used at home (or much at all outside of work, for that matter) for a very long time. Quite a strange-feeling prospect! And we have three languages in total to think about.
My wife and I are going to end up doing this almost in reverse: We live in Finland and converse almost entirely in English with one another, and we plan to speak in English to our kids, but our kids are obviously going to speak Finnish with almost everyone else in the family and at school.
Luckily I think it'll be a lot easier to keep a kid engaged at home with American English thanks to all the media we have. And it really is true that Finns have exceptional English skills, way beyond what I've encountered in e.g. France or Switzerland. This has to my knowledge only become more exceptional in the youth of today.
It's going to be really interesting to see whether they choose to head back to the USA in a few decades to chase greater wealth and capitalize on this advantage. I love the fact that we're in a situation to offer them such unparalleled mobility between two beautiful, very different lifestyles like this.
First of all, OP's Spanish accent is really, really, good.
I'm doing the same thing with my children and the most difficult thing to control is the environment.
They way We're tackling it is to let them communicate with us exclusively in one language and with their grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends, etc... in their language. They only watch cartoons in the language We communicate with to improve their accent.
They take a little longer to talk (that was the fear my wife had when I proposed her this idea), but it’s worth it. My original Idea was to teach them 3 languages but my wife wanted to also talk to them in her language too so We decided to focus on 2 (Spanish, English) rather than 3 (Spanish, English, and French).
One way to keep kids interested in another language is to let them watch animated shows or listen to soundtrack music in that language. That helped extend our kid’s interest in Spanish, and is helping her get into Chinese.
I tried to teach my children French. We had cartoons, and I even offered to pay them to listen to daily lessons. No dice.
To try to make a point about the ease of sitting inside listening to French versus manual labor to earn money, I offered them the same dollar amount to spend the same amount of time in the backyard breaking rocks with a hammer. Let me tell you how that backfired! Those two little boys were in hog heaven breaking rocks, and they asked me to do it again soon. I should have known better.
I am from Brazil, my wife from Finland and we live in Sweden. We speak English to each other.
To our two and half year old daughter, we speak our native languages and she learns Swedish in daycare.
In the beginning we showed some YouTube for her. The Brazilian Mundo Bita is great with catchy songs and amazing animation. My wife wanted to show the Moomins and we got some Swedish Babblarna as well. Disney+ has a lot of content already translated to every one of our languages. But we noticed that her mood swung wildly after her television stint, max 1h and not even every day. So we decided to not watch TV, for now at least, and concentrate on books/coloring/etc.
We read/have plenty of books. Sweden has great libraries with many titles for the little ones, also in different languages.
If I would rank her skills: #1 Finnish, #2-3 Portuguese/Swedish. This past month she started saying small things in English too, even singing the Happy Birthday song.
All kids are different, and interests ebb and flow, but I am hopeful that, in the future, Portuguese and Swedish might help with other languages like Spanish/Italian or Norwegian/Danish if she needs them for whatever reason.
It is impressive how kids can learn so many languages. But very tough, a constant effort to translate and encourage her to speak the native language of the parents. Specially in the beginning she would confuse who-speaks-what and we would scratch our heads when she made a phrase, in baby-speak no less, mixing different languages in it or modifying words to fit the logic of one language. Very interesting.
The main thing I learned is to find what interests the child and go that route. Be music, books, TV.
Thanks a lot for this info. I will be in a similar situation down the road. I speak Swedish, my girlfriend speaks an Indian minority language and we live in Switzerland.
I was always worried if the kid would be able to manage 4 languages. This gives me hope
I have many fond memories of our child, who speaks Finnish and English, switching languages mid-sentence.
"saisinko milk", or "Where the maito is?"
That happened for the first 2-3 years, but less often these days. Though Finnish is his native language he'll sometimes say "I don't know the English for this word" rather than just substituting the Finnish word.
Whenever the talks about bilingual, trilingual, quadrilingual, or multi-lingual come up, it gives me a nice feeling that we take it for granted. I grew up where people speak a different language every few miles.
In India, most of the new-age Indians are trilingual to start with. I’m not surprised when I meet someone who speaks English, Hindi, Sanskrit, French, along with their native language or a couple more Indian languages.
I have two daughters. The elder is already bilingual and is becoming OK-ish in the third. The younger one is still in English and can occasionally understand and blurt out the second language. My elder and I think French is a smooth and sexy language, and we might add that too. A close friend and parents (husband was a french teacher) in the neighborhood speaks French, so that might help.
We started with the “one-parent — one-language” approach very early on, which helped. And Thanks to Peppa Pig for being the best English teacher at the early stage.
> I’m not surprised when I meet someone who speaks English, Hindi, Sanskrit, French, along with their native language or a couple more Indian languages.
Many Indians do speak two or three languages, but 99% of Indians will not be speaking 5 languages so not sure why even bring it up, assuming its not a false story.
This didn't make my daughter 100% bilingual, but she's up there.
We live in a spanish speaking country.
Netflix (where she sees all her cartoons and movies) has always been set in English. She's 7 now and has never asked for it to be switched to Spanish.
Additionally, I read to her almost every day (before bed, sometimes during the day too) and 90% of the books were in English.
It would have been tough if, for some reason, she didn't liked the English books, but since I started before she could even speak I think it came naturally to her.
I used to speak in English with her (and she would reply), but at some point gave up.
Her listening skills and reading skills are amazing (and on par with her Spanish), but her speaking ability is not quite bilingual.
i'm always a bit wary of parents treating childhood language acquisition as a project - language fluency requires practice and interest to keep up, and pushing a kid to learn a language when they don't care can be counterproductive. many of my second-generation immigrant friends are now effectively monolingual because of that.
personally, i was raised bilingual, switched to full english in grade school because my parents were concerned about my english skills, and now i'm in a weird limbo where i'm technically still fluent in two languages, but i have bad first language attrition in one and i'll always feel like a non-native in the other. that being said, i'm glad that i still have access to two languages, and i hope that his daughter can find continued success as she grows older.
> many of my second-generation immigrant friends are now effectively monolingual because of that.
This is mostly to do "nervous spartan syndrome" from the parents, who are so anxious at losing their cultural heritage, that they overcompensate with their kids by correcting their pronunciation at every word, essentially punishing effort.
Families where I've seen this work well are the ones that take their kids yearly back to the old country to soak in the language with the locals. Of course, that implies money and time.
This can backfire sometimes. My parents tried to do this with me for Italian, and it ended up causing me some problems with English, so they had to stop. I still tend to slur my words in English, although I speak very well in Italian and have been learning the language very easily.
My kids are Spanish native, and learned German and English at their 4 and 6 years of age. Never a problem. Very common here in Europe. I don't get how that could cause trouble.
A kid can learn as much as 5 languages at a time as long as it is context related (like one language with one parent, another with other parent, another at school, another with a grand parent, another in another context).
Sure they may be times when the kid will mix'n'match because a specific word comes in his head in a language but he will still be fluent in all those languages after a few years.
Problem arise when there is no boundary in how which languages need to be used. Sometimes the brain feels like a piece of furniture full of drawers. I speak 4 languages and understand well 6 but when my mexican speaking partner ask me something in spanish right after a teams meeting in english I sometimes answer to her in english because my brain didn't have time to close the english drawer and open the spanish one. Same when we are at dinner and me and my daughters speak in spanish although we're all french but talk about what happened that day, which happened in spanish. At lease that is how I visualize it.
> Problem arise when there is no boundary in how which languages need to be used. Sometimes the brain feels like a piece of furniture full of drawers. I speak 4 languages and understand well 6 but when my mexican speaking partner ask me something in spanish right after a teams meeting in english I sometimes answer to her in english because my brain didn't have time to close the english drawer and open the spanish one. Same when we are at dinner and me and my daughters speak in spanish although we're all french but talk about what happened that day, which happened in spanish. At lease that is how I visualize it.
Is that really a problem though? It's true that sometimes I can't find the right words in a certain language, but have the perfect words in another. But so what? I mean I know many people who only speak a single language that know exactly what they'd like to say, but can't quite find the right words. Is it really that different?
Personally I find the fact that two people can have a conversation in two separate languages and that they can understand each other great. I mean would it be better to both stick to the same language even if one of you has more trouble speaking it? What exactly is the advantage to that?
Anyway I might be reading too much into your post, but I often hear many similar worries of people when it comes to speaking multiple languages and think often they are overthinking it. You're likely to be stronger in some languages rather than others. You're also likely to be better and listening to some languages rather than speaking them. These factors will also change due to context (what language is spoken around you, whether you're tired, etc.). To me these aren't problems. These are just the limitations of our brains and it's all just fine.
I didn't mean it as a problem but as an illustration on how our brain can struggle switching contexts. It is funny because it is exacerbated at night when you are tired.
Yeah that’s totally normal. I don’t speak much German or Spanish anymore (which is too bad), but that doesn't keep me from responding to German/Spanish with English/Swedish when speaking to them. I think there’s something kind of nice about two people speaking different languages and having no problems understanding each other.
Anyway I only bring this all up because I’ve met so many people worried about confusing their kids with multiple languages. The fact is they _will_ be confused and that is _fine_. Besides kids lack an enormous amount of vocabulary in their language even if they’re monolingual and they do just fine. Parents tend to more worried about this than kids.
>Problem arise when there is no boundary in how which languages need to be used.
Yeah, that's probably it. Knowing my parents, they probably both used English and Italian to speak to me. In general, my family tends to use both languages randomly when talking to each other (e.g. start the sentence in Italian, switch to English halfway through, and then switch back to Italian to end it).
That's a very common pattern amongst people who a) fluently speak more than one language, and b) share a great deal of (assumed / sub-conscious) social context.
Out of curiosity: are you never / sometimes / always conscious, as you are doing it, that you are mixing languages? From my knowledge - and observations - some people (at least situationally) are and some people aren't, although I've never seen an explanation of what determines that. Do you have any ideas?
>Out of curiosity: are you never / sometimes / always conscious, as you are doing it, that you are mixing languages?
My parents mostly stopped talking to me in Italian when I was a toddler, so I'm not fully bilingual. Whenever I use Italian, it's done consciously, because I have to actively think about what I'm supposed to say. The only exception is with a few words that were only ever said to me in Italian, like basilico (basil). In those situations, I usually have to catch myself and remember to use the English words whenever I'm around people who aren't also Italian.
Think of anyone you’ve encountered whose native language is different than yours. Chances are they had an accent. The less fluent they were, or the more different their native language was to yours, the thicker the accent. The thicker their accent, the harder they were for you to understand.
Awesome. As someone who is bilingual, it made traveling through South America so much easier. Stay away from that Chilean Spanish though, lol. Those that have tried ordering food there will know what I mean. Too many of their nouns are completely different words from the rest of the Spanish. Never before did I feel like I wasn't understood even though technically I spoke the same language.
I know too many people who were children of immigrants who speak, read, and write fluently in both their parent's native language and the language where they grew up to know that your experience can't be representative.
Speaking Dutch/English/Japanese in Japan, I decided early on that teaching my son Dutch in a country where nobody speaks that language was a bad idea, so I spoke english instead.
As someone who speaks several languages myself and native in Spanish and French, this is not a big deal.
People in my family do that all the time, each parent speak a different language, and in the school-outside they learn another.
As a kid you just get used to it. You are not going to become a master speaker as you will learn to speak the language but not write it as an educated person and have to choose later what do you study advance grammar and so on, but being able to read books in a language is a huge deal for getting advance grammar on your own.
It also makes very easy to learn new languages and opens you a lot of gates as you can basically move anywhere in the world and adapt to their view. People react differently if you speak what they speak.
Even with my older one I stopped the German when she was a bit older because I didn't want to be the only one having simplistic conversations and I also prefer speaking English myself.
In retrospect I regret my laziness. Some of my German drinking buddies, even the ones with American wives, kept it up and I feel a bit guilty.
Lessons I've learned:
- It's a lot easier when a stay-home parent speaks the foreign language
- Speaking a "useful" foreign language (Spanish, Mandarin) might be easier, especially if there are immersion programs in your town
- Success varies with each child