Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

joeprevite.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 101 posts

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#31

Post by cracrecry »

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.

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#32

Post by tetris11 »

adelie wrote: post #27

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 par…

> 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.

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#33

Post by matteoraso »

prmoustache wrote: post #28
kwanbix wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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).

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#34

Post by meowtimemania »

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 think it's for the same reason that you haven't learned a third language other than english.

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#35

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

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.

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#36

Post by alexfoo »

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.

No need for a train. I could find conversational French/Spanish/German really easily where I live now in London. I have at least 5 native speakers of each of those languages who are friends and live within a mile of me. Right now it is just laziness.

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.

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#37

Post by charlie0 »

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.

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#38

Post by sho_hn »

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.

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#39

Post by [deleted] »

cracrecry wrote: post #31

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…

[deleted]

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#40

Post by sneed_chucker »

zwieback wrote: post #15

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…

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.

Post reply on HN