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.
Two years of raising a bilingual daughter
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Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter
#12Good 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.
American here - I'm still working on English and it's been a few decades, so I think I might have trouble with another language. I live in South Texas so there are sometimes situations where Spanish is the only language spoken and I can get by well enough with it I suppose. But English gets you pretty far the world over, so we can afford to be lazy about it.
Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter
#13Good 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.
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?
Yup, why should I learn it? I simply have too few occasions to interact with someone who speaks Spanish but not English that it would have been quite a waste of effort to learn.
Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter
#14I have some friends where the Mom is Taiwanese and the Father is Peruvian. They have a one and a half year old daughter. The father only speaks Spanish to her and the mother only speaks Chinese to her. But neither parent speaks the other’s language, so they talk to each other in English and all their friends and neighbors only speak English. So far the kid seems to prefer Chinese.
Purely guessing here, but the closest connection a one and a half year old usually has is its mother. Fathers only become more "relevant" to them at 2+ years and people outside the family even later. So it would be normal for the kid to pick up the mother's tongue. But it would be interesting to see how this preference evolves in the coming years.
Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter
#15This 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
Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter
#16Good 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.
I think it really comes down to the proximity to areas that speak that language. I can travel 100s of miles in every direction from my home in the US and only find English speakers. If there was a town that spoke Spanish 50 miles away, I may consider picking it up. Not many Europeans speak Chinese, why do you think that is?
A coding challenge for someone with more GIS knowledge than I have: use the dataset behind this map https://hub.arcgis.com/maps/847cabe2dfc64f92918f2c282e3cedfb (number of households where Spanish is the primary spoken language by census tract) and see if you can find a location in the United States where you can travel 100s of miles in any direction without encountering a Spanish speaker.
Might be somewhere in Alaska, maybe?
Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter
#17This can backfire sometimes. My parents tried to do this with me for Italian, and it ended up causing me some problems with English, so they had to stop. I still tend to slur my words in English, although I speak very well in Italian and have been learning the language very easily.
My kids are Spanish native, and learned German and English at their 4 and 6 years of age. Never a problem. Very common here in Europe. I don't get how that could cause trouble.
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.
Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter
#18It 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!"
Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
And yet plenty of Americans travel to Europe. Wouldn't hurt to pick up a few words in a foreign language, no?
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.
Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter
#20I 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.