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Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

joeprevite.com

71–80 of 101 posts

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#71
First of all, OP's Spanish accent is really, really, good.

I'm doing the same thing with my children and the most difficult thing to control is the environment.

They way We're tackling it is to let them communicate with us exclusively in one language and with their grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends, etc... in their language. They only watch cartoons in the language We communicate with to improve their accent.

They take a little longer to talk (that was the fear my wife had when I proposed her this idea), but it’s worth it. My original Idea was to teach them 3 languages but my wife wanted to also talk to them in her language too so We decided to focus on 2 (Spanish, English) rather than 3 (Spanish, English, and French).

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#72
It's good to also talk about failures, so let me tell a failure story. I intended to do this the other way round: I'm a native Spanish speaker with good command of English (officially CEFR C2 level which is the highest recognized in Europe) and I intended to always speak to my son in English so that he could be bilingual (or trilingual, as we also have an additional regional language here).

It was an utter failure. Soon after he was born, I discovered that even though in theory my English skills are good in theory, speaking to him in English would impose an emotional distance. It wouldn't be as natural to express love and affection in English, I felt it would be a barrier between us and I really wanted to be close to my baby, so I gave up.

Then, as the kid grew, and as a plan B, I learned that some parents used the strategy of using English in a specific situation (a given room of the house, time of the day, etc.). I first used it in the kitchen, but then my parents (my mother doesn't speak English) moved to live with us because circumstances, so it became very awkward and I stopped. Then I decided to use it in playgrounds instead. But as my son learned to talk and express himself better, he started to get angry. He would say "¡En castellano! ¡En castellano!" ("In Spanish! In Spanish!"). I tried to convince him, but he is very stubborn, so I mostly gave up because otherwise he was always angry with me in the playground.

So now (he is 4 years old) I just try to tell him things about English sometimes, read some stories in English to him (but not too many because he gets angry and demands "en castellano"), and things like that. I hope he will still learn English, like I did, but the bilinguality plan failed.

Big respect and kudos to those who manage to keep it up!

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#73
post #29

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 worki…

> Some kids are just better at language than others.

Not really, huge number of people of living in India can speak two or three languages. Their own state's language which they speak at home, Hindi and English which they learn in school and talking to their friends.

Are you going to say that Indians are better at languages compared with other countries or its easy to pick up languages when you are exposed to them at a young age.

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#74

I 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.

> all their friends and neighbors only speak English.

most probably the kid when they grow up will prefer English because their friends speak English.

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#75

In my experience it's hard for a child to speak both languages very well if they are bilingual. So you end up with one of two situations: a) one language is spoken much better than the other one, or b) neither language is spoken very well.

> In my experience it's hard for a child to speak both languages very well if they are bilingual.

No, lot of Indians speak 2 even 3 languages very well. Its all about how you are exposed to the language when you are young.

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#76

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…

> 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.

Many Indians do speak two or three languages, but 99% of Indians will not be speaking 5 languages so not sure why even bring it up, assuming its not a false story.

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I didn't mean it as a problem but as an illustration on how our brain can struggle switching contexts. It is funny because it is exacerbated at night when you are tired.

Yeah that’s totally normal. I don’t speak much German or Spanish anymore (which is too bad), but that doesn't keep me from responding to German/Spanish with English/Swedish when speaking to them. I think there’s something kind of nice about two people speaking different languages and having no problems understanding each other.

Anyway I only bring this all up because I’ve met so many people worried about confusing their kids with multiple languages. The fact is they _will_ be confused and that is _fine_. Besides kids lack an enormous amount of vocabulary in their language even if they’re monolingual and they do just fine. Parents tend to more worried about this than kids.

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#78
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.

As an American they taught us Spanish since grade 4. I would like to say I’m decent. Unusually good grammar. Bad, small vocabulary.

It’s never been needed. It’s been a bit useful about 5 times.

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#79

It seems very cruel to the child to force bilingualism for the sake of being bilingual. I was raised speaking 5(!) languages, and over time that has attritioned into speaking only 3, but each language had its purpose: mainly in speaking to a different group of people in my home country, for official documents, or was the language on all the interesting TV shows. The hard part about a new language, if you intuitively…

I agree, it seems artificial to me. My daughter is bilingual but that's because her mother is German and we live in Germany. When we're all together we speak English, when my daughter and I are alone we speak English, and when I'm not around they speak German. When we're around Germans we speak German. That's how things just naturally unfolded. If our daughter replies in German during an English conversation we don't force her to speak English.

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As an adult it's really hard to pick up a language to be conversational. I tried, it's alot of dedication.

Then I went to Mexico, no one understood me. I guess I have an accent or issues with pronunciation. If I did ask a question, I didn't understand the answer. Everyone just spoke English.

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