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I'm going to share this in case someone finds it useful... I am Canadian and married to a Spanish women and living in Spain. While my son started out sponging
by mipapage 12y ago
I'm going to share this in case someone finds it useful...
I am Canadian and married to a Spanish women and living in Spain. While my son started out sponging up both languages, he eventually took off in Spanish and left English behind. In order to have some form of relationship with him I had to speak Spanish with him.
People would lecture me, "oh, give him that gift of English" or "how can you not be speaking English to him?".
Now that he is older and has discovered the Internet, he has a need to learn English. And he's learned. I'm sure it was there all along, he went from not speaking English to speaking it in about two weeks.
My wife and I would speak English around him, and sometimes I would speak English to him, but it really wasn't until he needed to, like the child in the OP story, that he learned English.
- emodendroket 12y agoYeah, unfortunately kids get pretty clever about this and resist doing language acquisition that isn't necessary.
- mipapage 12y agoWhen I came to Spain a lot of (Spanish) people would give me the "why do we need to learn English?", and then the market crashed. To this day I interact with younger folk who continue this line of thinking; the ones who leave and learn English and find work are going to be much better prepared...
- emodendroket 12y agoWhat I mean by "necessary" is "necessary to a child, for his day-to-day life." Very often kids pick up that Mom and Dad understand (at least to some extent) the local language too and then stop picking up whatever the second language is. Anyway, at least Spanish people are speaking one of the world's most widely used languages... I think the top four are Chinese, French, Spanish, and English, but don't quote me on it.