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Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

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Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#21

Post by IshKebab »

kwanbix wrote: post #3

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.

> I always wonder why so many Americans/Brits do not speak Spanish as their second language

I don't know about America, but for Britain:

* Spanish is one language of many, rather than "the other language" like it is in America. It's not even the closest country. French is more popular by far (the standard languages in school are French and German).

* It's extremely unlikely that someone from the UK would spend any significant time in Spain while growing up. Maybe one or two family holidays, but those are expensive, and it's unlikely that you'd always go on holiday in the same country anyway. It's simply not enough to motivate learning the language. Imagine if you went to Russia for a week once when you were young. Would you learn Russian? Of course not.

I had never been to Spain until my 20s. It's not at all uncommon. In fact I had only been to the continent maybe 4 times before uni. Also not uncommon. It doesn't help that the government has criminalised term time holidays. A family holiday in Europe is a huge luxury for most people.

* Like it or not, English is the lingua franca of the modern world. If you're not a native English speaker and you are going to learn another language, it's pretty obvious that you're going to learn English in most circumstances. Think about programming - it's common for programs to be written in English even if all of the authors are native speakers of a different language. If you are a native English speaker which language should you learn? It's far less obvious. That has certainly led me to not be so motivated to learn another language.

I guess Chinese would probably be the obvious choice, but that's extremely difficult and I'm unlikely to ever actually go there...

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#24

Post by commandlinefan »

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.

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#25

Post by m00x »

alexfoo wrote: post #8
kwanbix wrote: post #3

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.

Brit here, mid 40s. 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 (eventua…

You could just jump on a train for 35 euros and be in France in a few hours, and a bit more to go to Germany/Spain.

Imagine being in Canada/US where you don't have any other language outside of a 6h plane ride.

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#26

Post by bnralt »

kwanbix wrote: post #3

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.

Most people learn languages for a reason. English is the global language now, so a lot of people learn it, native English speakers already speak the global language. The U.S. has a sizeable amount of native Spanish speakers, so it also has a fairly sizeable amount of native-English speakers that can speak Spanish with some degree of proficiency. Probably more than most European’s learn minority languages in their countries. I don’t think I’ve met any people from Madrid that study Catalan or Basque just to speak with the minority of people there who speak those languages.

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#27

Post by adelie »

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.

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#28

Post by prmoustache »

kwanbix wrote: post #4
matteoraso wrote: post #2

This can backfire sometimes. My parents tried to do this with me for Italian, and it ended up causing me some problems with English, so they had to stop. I still tend to slur my words in English, although I speak very well in Italian and have been learning the language very easily.

My kids are Spanish native, and learned German and English at their 4 and 6 years of age. Never a problem. Very common here in Europe. I don't get how that could cause trouble.

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.

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#29

Post by m00x »

commandlinefan wrote: post #24

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 co…

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.

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#30

Post by prmoustache »

m00x wrote: post #25
alexfoo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brit here, mid 40s. 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 (eventua…

You could just jump on a train for 35 euros and be in France in a few hours, and a bit more to go to Germany/Spain. Imagine being in Canada/US where you don't have any other language outside of a 6h plane ride.

OTOH you guys take the car when we take a walk to do our groceries and fly as easily as we take a city bus to go to another neighborhood.
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