Raising multilingual kids

A Dutch-Spanish conversation.

Peter — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 16:50:05 +0000

At the table, Amelia eating with a fork (3 1/2 years old).

Me: “Moet je een lepel hebben Amelia?” (Do you want a spoon?)

Ame: “Que?”

Me: “Een lepel?”

Ame: “No estoy bien con este tenedor.”

She really understands me when I speak Dutch to her (and responds in Spanish). That’s encouraging.

Back in the game

Peter — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 12:39:16 +0000

Since I went on a trip to Belgium a few months ago, I had totally given up on talking Flemish to Ame. It was all Spanish. The motivation was gone.

But I’m back, talking Flemish again to her since a few days. She’s really liking it too, it seems, repeating a lot of words, so I’m encouraged. She still speaks Spanish back, but I hope I can get her to talk Flemish to me over the next year or so…

Living in Colombia now, and it’s aaall Spanish!

Peter — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:51:29 +0000

We’ve finally moved permanently to Colombia, so Amelia is 100% surrounded by Spanish speaking people now. We’ve been here a few months, she’s almost 2 1/2 now, and starting to speak a lot more. Her sentences are up to 3 words now, her vocabulary is going up fast.

I try to speak Dutch to her all the time, although I have noticed I throw in Spanish words here and there. Sometimes she already knows the word in Spanish, and it can be a hassle to use the word in Dutch if she doesn’t know it. But in general, it’s all Dutch from me.

She responds a lot in Spanish though, which is now fast becoming her main language that she uses most of the time.

I’m gonna keep up the good fight, see how it goes. Next time we go to Belgium, I’m definitely going to stock up on Dutch-language videos and such though.

No mas!

Peter — Fri, 01 May 2009 05:41:14 +0000

Amelia said “No mas” today. Still mostly speaking Spanish. I don’t know how she will speak Dutch if we’re gonna be moving to a full-on Spanish speaking environment (except for me that is) within a few months…

More Spanish than Dutch

Peter — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 07:14:39 +0000

It’s funny, Amelia is almost 2 and starting to use more and more words, and I notice she seems to be speaking mostly Spanish. (As you recall, Maria speaks Spanish to her, everyone else Dutch). She says things like “’pato” (for “zapato”, which means shoe), and “gato” (for cat) and “aleta” (for ‘”galetta”, cookie). So it seems the influence of the mother is pretty strong, because everyone else (me, the people in the daycare, family) speaks Dutch to her.

Soon we’ll be spending 6 months in India where there will be 3 native Spanish speakers and a lot of English. We’ll see how that goes!

Raising in 4 languages and loosing them

Peter — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 06:43:29 +0000

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?

Bilingual babies make better decisions

Peter — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 08:39:51 +0000

Here you go, good news about raising multilingual kids: “A study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says that some aspects of the cognitive development of infants raised in a bilingual household must be undergoing acceleration in order to manage which of the two languages they are dealing with. The aspect of cognition in question is part of what is termed the brain’s “executive function”. This allows people to organise, plan, prioritise activity, shift their attention from one thing to another and suppress habitual responses.”

The study was done with 7-month old babies.

Multilingual kids and family

Peter — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 19:29:09 +0000

We are visiting family these days, and I noticed they weren’t very sure which language to speak to the kid, Spanish or English. I think it should be generally the native language (Spanish in this case), unless you want to encourage that other language explicitly. In any case, I have the feeling those things set in a pattern pretty easily so there’s no need to explicitly discuss it.

Anyone care to share experiences dealing with family and multilingual kids?

Extra grammar and writing classes?

Peter — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 15:53:12 +0000

I am wondering if people give their kids extra grammar and writing classes? If you teach your child a language that isn’t spoken or written where they live, you would want them to learn to speak/write well, right? So you might need to give additional classes, with actual exercises etc? Does anyone do this, or would that be considered a bit over the top?

Myths about teaching multiple languages to your kids

Peter — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 22:10:48 +0000

This is a list of myths about teaching multiple languages to your kids. It’s based in part on the list found here.

Why don’t you teach them 1 language first, and other languages later, when they speak the first language well?

It is easier for a child to learn multiple languages at the same time, than to learn 1 language well and then learn another one. Just look at your own experience learning new languages. There are plenty of studies showing this.

Won’t they learn slower or be more confused if you speak multiple languages to them?

No, not really. Many countries are monolingual, and parents there are not used to multilingual kids. But many countries are also multilingual, and experience shows that kids can easily learn multiple languages (up to 3 or 4 without problems). It all depends on the amount of exposure they get to those languages and the motivation they have to speak them.

The kid mixes languages, they won’t learn to speak properly.

Children mix languages when they are learning multiple languages, this is completely normal and temporary. The more words they learn in each language, the better they’ll get at distinguishing them.

Other myths, or things that concerned parents of monolingual kids (or your parents) tell you?