I got an email the other day that I thought I’d share here. It’s about raising your kids in multiple languages and the kids then loosing interest and loosing the language. This is exactly what I’m afraid of when we move to Colombia. What do you do when your kids don’t want to speak the minority languages anymore?
Hello,
I came upon your website in search for help raising by children in 3 languages. I myself grew up bilingually. My parents are Hungarian and we lived in Germany. Our rules were: no German at home. That was pretty smart, because by the time I was in high school we the kids (there was 5 of us, later one more) just wanted to discuss everything in the language in which everything important happened to us: German. Even with no German allowed at home I my German vocabulary was much higher than my Hungarian. I am convinced this method saved my Hungarian. Two of my siblings actually moved back to Hungary.Now I ended up in the USA marrying a German. We have two boys, 5 and 3. So far everything went great. I spoke mostly Hungarian to them, my husband German, they visited a Spanish daycare until they were 4 and 2. And English just stuck to them as dirt. My 5-year-old really spoke all 4 languages.
However then we moved. I stay at home now and my husband travels a lot, so no more Spanish, some English and i try to balance Hungarian and German. Still my older son just won’t speak anything else but English urging his younger brother to do the same. I have a constant struggle to at least keep our native languages alive in them. (Spanish might get another chance later in school.)
I am desperately looking for help how to manage it. I refuse to give up.
What a story! I couldn’t give many tips (our child isn’t even speaking yet), anyone out there want to leave tips in the comments?