Two years of raising a bilingual daughter
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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
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.
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.
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.)
It’s not good or bad. It just is.
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.
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.
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!
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!
As for the use of castellano for Spanish-in-general see e.g. https://spanish.stackexchange.com/questions/913/is-there-a-d...
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Español_de_América#/media/Arch...
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.
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.
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.
Now I speak English with a slight accent.
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 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.
While being polite, lots of people will think of you as a retarded child.
If you travel to Mexico for instance, the difference is staggering between someone with a command of Spanish and someone that speaks English only.
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.
Might be somewhere in Alaska, maybe?
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.
Imagine being in Canada/US where you don't have any other language outside of a 6h plane ride.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://upthegains.co.uk/blog/what-is-a-good-salary-in-londo....
[2] https://news.sky.com/story/rightmove-reveals-average-rents-i...
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.
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.
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!)
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...
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.
It’s never been needed. It’s been a bit useful about 5 times.
I like using Spanish where I can. But it’s irrelevant.
most probably the kid when they grow up will prefer English because their friends speak English.
[0] https://smartparentingpod.com/one-parent-one-language-opol-m...
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'm cracking up imagining a little kiddo looking at their parents super confused wondering if he's hallucinating or just going crazy (～￣▽￣)～
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
I was always worried if the kid would be able to manage 4 languages. This gives me hope
What makes you worry exactly? I mean in the case your child can't really manage 4 languages, is that a problem?
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
So you end up with one of two situations: a) one language is spoken much better than the other one, or b) neither language is spoken very well.
No, lot of Indians speak 2 even 3 languages very well. Its all about how you are exposed to the language when you are young.
Now he’s 5, and I regret that.
1) Too many common words with differences in their pronunciation.
2) I imagine a heavily English-accented Spanish. "You must be from Spain." Yeah, right.
With the pervasiveness of English (yay hollywood) it comes almost naturally.
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.