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Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

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Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#51

Post by matteoraso »

eszed wrote: post #43
matteoraso wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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).

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…

>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.

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#52

Post by mc32 »

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…

One interesting thing is if only one parent speaks the second language then kids will tend to only (obviously) pick up the tendencies of that speaker.

So if a dad then the kid, irrespective of their gender, will pick up dad’s masculine tendencies or if mom her feminine tendencies. (dad may say the equiv of "dude" and mom may say the equiv of "guys", those sorts of things.)

It’s not good or bad. It just is.

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#53

Post by makeitdouble »

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…

I think getting the kid to get familiar with the sounds as early as possible is the critical point.

If they reach a point they recognize all the sounds and properly vocalize, I think we can give them a break and speak what they want. It will never be too late to get deeper into the language and learn to properly speak on their own terms, when they're morivated to do it.

In particular I think it's frustrating both for the kid an the parent to speak a language that look like a dead end, when there is nothing to read/watch in it that the kid enjoys, or friends of their age speaking it too.

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#54

Post by _tik_ »

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.

In South East Asia is common to speak multiple language too. All my family member can speak at least 4 languages. Most of SEAs can speak at least 2 languages.

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#55

Post by dopidopHN »

sho_hn wrote: post #47
m00x wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I call this the "I don't understand why Europeans don't go for lunch in Paris" puzzlement. I've had variations of this conversation with many American friends over the years ... :)

I’m French but lives in the US since a while.

Distances just hit differently on their side of the Atlantic.

It’s considerably less tiresome and costly to cover long distance in cars.

I noticed that a 500km ride in France is very long distance. A once in a summer thing. While a 350miles trajectory in the us is something I can do with less friction.

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#56

Post by dopidopHN »

zwieback wrote: post #19
Tomis02 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#57

Post by dopidopHN »

hotpotamus wrote: post #12
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.

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.

Absolutely, but it’s a rewarding experience to exchange with a foreign culture in there own language. Not some pivot language like English.

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#58

Post by dopidopHN »

4star3star wrote: post #20

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…

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

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#59

Post by Brajeshwar »

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.

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#60

Post by oh_nice_marmot »

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.

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