13 ms·

Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

74 points by jsjoeio 3y ago

matteoraso 3y ago
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.
- kwanbix 3y ago
  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.
  - ChristianGeek 3y ago
    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.
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    It is unlikely to be the cause. 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.
    - matteoraso 3y ago
      >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).
      - eszed 3y ago
        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?
        matteoraso 3y ago
        >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.
    - CogitoCogito 3y ago
      > 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.
kwanbix 3y ago
Good for him. 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.
- trust_bt_verify 3y ago
  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?
  - Tomis02 3y ago
    And yet plenty of Americans travel to Europe. Wouldn't hurt to pick up a few words in a foreign language, no?
    - zwieback 3y ago
      I think part of it is that so many people around the world speak English so if English is your first language it's easier to get around.
      - dopidopHN 3y ago
        But you get the English treatment. 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.
        tayo42 3y ago
        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.
irrational 3y ago
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.
- sigmoid10 3y ago
  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.
  - irrational 3y ago
    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.
- sumedh 3y ago
  > all their friends and neighbors only speak English. most probably the kid when they grow up will prefer English because their friends speak English.
inasio 3y ago
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 [0] https://smartparentingpod.com/one-parent-one-language-opol-method-is-it-effective-for-bilingualism/ https://smartparentingpod.com/one-parent-one-language-opol-m...
- Moru 3y ago
  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.
gnicholas 3y ago
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.
zwieback 3y ago
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 - Success varies with each child
- sneed_chucker 3y ago
  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.
- KMag 3y ago
  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.
themaninthedark 3y ago
It all depends on the situation and the kid. 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!"
- user_7832 3y ago
  > "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 (～￣▽￣)～
4star3star 3y ago
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.
- dopidopHN 3y ago
  Non mais tu cherchais la merde aussi là. Breaking rocks VS schoolish activities ? No shit !
Havoc 3y ago
Any language other than English at home is highly likely to end up with the kids bilingual anyway. With the pervasiveness of English (yay hollywood) it comes almost naturally.
Koshkin 3y ago
Sounds like a terrible idea (in general). 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.
commandlinefan 3y ago
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.
- m00x 3y ago
  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. Now I speak English with a slight accent.
  - sumedh 3y ago
    > 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.
    - m00x 3y ago
      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.
adelie 3y ago
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.
- tetris11 3y ago
  > 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.
cracrecry 3y ago
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.
- deleted 3y ago
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hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
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.
charlie0 3y ago
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.
sho_hn 3y ago
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.
e63f67dd-065b 3y ago
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.
- zolbrek 3y ago
  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.
dottjt 3y ago
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.
Brajeshwar 3y ago
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.
- sumedh 3y ago
  > 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.
oh_nice_marmot 3y ago
We have a similar configuration at home. 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.
- Gud 3y ago
  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
  - CogitoCogito 3y ago
    > 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?
Aeolun 3y ago
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. Now he’s 5, and I regret that.
- zoover2020 3y ago
  Het is nooit te laat!
hahamaster 3y ago
In my experience it's hard for a child to speak both languages very well if they are bilingual. 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.
- sumedh 3y ago
  > In my experience it's hard for a child to speak both languages very well if they are bilingual. 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.
- mazugrin2 3y ago
  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.
elforce002 3y ago
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).
Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago
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!
- prismatix 3y ago
  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!
hfhdjdks 3y ago
My lazy guide: 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.

74 points by jsjoeio 3y ago

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.

kwanbix 3y ago
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.
- ChristianGeek 3y ago
  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.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  It is unlikely to be the cause. 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.
  - matteoraso 3y ago
    >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).
    - eszed 3y ago
      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?
      - matteoraso 3y ago
        >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.
  - CogitoCogito 3y ago
    > 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.

kwanbix 3y ago

Good for him. 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.

trust_bt_verify 3y ago
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?
- Tomis02 3y ago
  And yet plenty of Americans travel to Europe. Wouldn't hurt to pick up a few words in a foreign language, no?
  - zwieback 3y ago
    I think part of it is that so many people around the world speak English so if English is your first language it's easier to get around.
    - dopidopHN 3y ago
      But you get the English treatment. 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.
      - tayo42 3y ago
        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.

irrational 3y ago

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.

sigmoid10 3y ago
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.
- irrational 3y ago
  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.
sumedh 3y ago
> all their friends and neighbors only speak English. most probably the kid when they grow up will prefer English because their friends speak English.

inasio 3y ago

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 [0] https://smartparentingpod.com/one-parent-one-language-opol-method-is-it-effective-for-bilingualism/ https://smartparentingpod.com/one-parent-one-language-opol-m...

Moru 3y ago
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.

gnicholas 3y ago

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.

zwieback 3y ago

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 - Success varies with each child

sneed_chucker 3y ago
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.
KMag 3y ago
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.

themaninthedark 3y ago

It all depends on the situation and the kid. 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!"

user_7832 3y ago
> "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 (～￣▽￣)～

4star3star 3y ago

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.

dopidopHN 3y ago
Non mais tu cherchais la merde aussi là. Breaking rocks VS schoolish activities ? No shit !

Havoc 3y ago

Any language other than English at home is highly likely to end up with the kids bilingual anyway. With the pervasiveness of English (yay hollywood) it comes almost naturally.

Koshkin 3y ago

Sounds like a terrible idea (in general). 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.

commandlinefan 3y ago

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.

m00x 3y ago
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. Now I speak English with a slight accent.
- sumedh 3y ago
  > 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.
  - m00x 3y ago
    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.

adelie 3y ago

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.

tetris11 3y ago
> 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.

cracrecry 3y ago

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.

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hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago

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.

charlie0 3y ago

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.

sho_hn 3y ago

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.

e63f67dd-065b 3y ago

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.

zolbrek 3y ago
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.

dottjt 3y ago

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.

Brajeshwar 3y ago

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.

sumedh 3y ago
> 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.

oh_nice_marmot 3y ago

We have a similar configuration at home. 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.

Gud 3y ago
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
- CogitoCogito 3y ago
  > 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?

Aeolun 3y ago

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. Now he’s 5, and I regret that.

zoover2020 3y ago
Het is nooit te laat!

hahamaster 3y ago

In my experience it's hard for a child to speak both languages very well if they are bilingual. 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.

sumedh 3y ago
> In my experience it's hard for a child to speak both languages very well if they are bilingual. 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.
mazugrin2 3y ago
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.

elforce002 3y ago

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).

Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago

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!

prismatix 3y ago
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!

hfhdjdks 3y ago

My lazy guide: 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.