Comments for Raising multilingual kids

Comment on Teaching a child Spanish and Dutch by Sonja

Sonja — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 11:33:14 +0000

I think what you’re doing for your child is one of the best things a parent can do! I grew up in New York with a mother from Bolivia and a father from New York (who learned passable, though very grammatically messy Spanish). Once my mother went back to work, they hired a Panamanian nanny to look after me, so that I’d be sure to learn Spanish. It made my life a lot easier, and now that I’m in a profession in which I’ve had to learn both French and German, I thank my parents every day that they gave me the basic skills with which to learn other languages easily. I’ve also been able to help people in the street and make friends with strangers all the time!

Comment on Teaching a child Spanish and Dutch by Peter

Peter — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 21:17:06 +0000

Thanks for the link and the tips Claudia!

Comment on Lots of comments by Victor

Victor — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 21:13:58 +0000

When I was learning German, I used to label everything in my apartment so I would associate the thing with the word. Now that we’re moving into a new home, I plan to start doing that again, but in two languages so my son can start to learn both (maybe I’ll color code them to ‘partition’ them :-). I’ll probably start with places we won’t mind having labels stuck on, like the tool pinboard in the basement.

Comment on Teaching a child Spanish and Dutch by Claudia Rodriguez O

Claudia Rodriguez O — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 21:52:02 +0000

We have a very similar situation to yours. My kid is 2.5 yrs, I am Mexican and my partner is Dutch and we mostly speak English together (and some Dutch). Since the beginning we decided to stick to the One Person One Language (OPOL)language system, so I only speak Spanish and my partner only speaks Dutch to him. Since we live in Amsterdam, his surroundings are mostly Dutch so although he understands Spanish perfectly, he speaks mostly Dutch. However, I *always* repeat his words back in Spanish and I am very consistent in speaking Spanish to him. I also take him to playgroups with Spanish speaking mothers and children.

We are planning a trip to Mexico and I am curious to see how he will react there, as he will be forced to speak Spanish.
There is some useful information in this site
http://www.multilingualchildren.org/

Children are very smart and they will pick up any language very quicky!
Good luck

Comment on Starting this blog about raising multilingual kids today by Andrea Resmini

Andrea Resmini — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 13:34:27 +0000

Peter, this is a tough moment for the family, but I’m sure I’ll look forward to your insights on this incredibly fascinating issues and hopefully we’ll find ways to contribute with our own observations. As you might remember, Gaia (who is now 9) has been dealing with Italian and Swedish (and of course English, seems obvious, doesn’t it) for some time now and she’s going to go total Svenska in the near future.

Thanks for a great initiative.

Comment on Teaching babies sign language by Michael J. Trout

Michael J. Trout — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 11:30:09 +0000

I’m teaching my son English as we live in Japan. When he’s 3 I plan on having him start learning Chinese. I am an English teacher. I teach English to Japanese Kids from kindergarten and up. I have developed a number of gesture techniques — I don’t bother wasting their time learning the alphabet. Instead, I teach them the phonics sounds with gestures that lead on to phrases with gestures. I good method, I’ve found is chanting games. My nearly 2 yr old can chant (by repeating after me) the entire alphabet in phonics. We also play a game in the car where I chant the sound and he will say words with the sound in it.

Objective one — get the child to form all the language sounds.
Objective two — associate the sounds to the words.

When a child achieves a basic vocabulary of some 200 words start differentiating the different languages. I have started to bring awareness to him that we are speaking different languages. For example I will say: Mama says — “Kairu;” Dada says — “frog.” And have just started to test him on words by asking him to tell me by using “mama says… and dada says ?” and visa vera.

Keep it fun and playful.

good luck!

Michael

Comment on Teaching a child Spanish and Dutch by ben

ben — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 11:00:04 +0000

Our approach is one language for each parent. This means each parent must try and speak to the child in only their selected language. We are getting good results with our daughter who is nearly 2. She clearly understands both my wife (Thai) and I (English) and speaks a good mixture of both (as much as a 2 year old can). It’s definitely not easy for the minority language but consistency is the key.

Comment on Teaching babies sign language by Peter

Peter — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 08:28:32 +0000

We found the “eating” sign the most useful so far, that and the “drinking” (“water”) sign. She does the more sign too, uses it a lot. And that’s about it. We have a “sleeping” and a “poop” sign too that she uses..

Comment on Teaching babies sign language by Victor Lombardi

Victor Lombardi — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 03:57:19 +0000

[does] understand how to wave…

Comment on Teaching babies sign language by Victor Lombardi

Victor Lombardi — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 03:56:42 +0000

We’re only shown Thomas one sign so far: “more” which we thought would come in handy while eating. He laughs when we do it, but he hasn’t imitated us yet. He doesn’t understand how to wave goodbye though, which is a sort of sign.