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.<p>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 simplistic conversations and I also prefer speaking English myself.<p>In retrospect I regret my laziness. Some of my German drinking buddies, even the ones with American wives, kept it up and I feel a bit guilty.<p>Lessons I've learned:<p>- It's a lot easier when a stay-home parent speaks the foreign language<p>- Speaking a "useful" foreign language (Spanish, Mandarin) might be easier, especially if there are immersion programs in your town<p>- Success varies with each child
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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Big respect and kudos to those who manage to keep it up!
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 cousins are girls, so when we went to visit family our son went off and played with the Spanish speaking boys while our daughter found something neutral to do.
Good for him.<p>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.<p>Now I live in Europe, and here it is very common for people to know 3 or 4 languages.<p>Being able to communicate on any other language is so great.
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.
Wow, just learned from the post about OPOL [0], didn't know it was a thing, but at least in our case it worked for 3 languages. My wife and I speak different languages (French and Spanish), we each speak exclusively with that one to our kids. They didn't know English when they started preschool, but it took them a couple of months. Right now they are close to native on all 3. Kids are amazing<p>[0] <a href="https://smartparentingpod.com/one-parent-one-language-opol-method-is-it-effective-for-bilingualism/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://smartparentingpod.com/one-parent-one-language-opol-m...</a>
It all depends on the situation and the kid.<p>I speak to my kids in Japanese mostly as well as my wife but we also speak to them in English. Both of our kids are considered behind their age group in English.<p>One of my friends spoke their son in Arabic, his wife spoke to their son in Japanese and they spoke to each other in English. They had to change that because their son wasn't speaking by age 3. Once they started speaking only English all the time, their son did great. Now he can speak all 3 no problem but as the doctor they took him to said "No wonder he isn't speaking, he's not sure what is going on!"
I feel unless if there's an absolute need to speak two languages, I think trying to teach a child two languages is pointless. I say this from the point of view of the other experiences that a child can have, in place of language.<p>My background is half Chinese and I was forced into language school to learn Chinese and ended up studying Chinese for close to a decade (I even lived in China for a year).<p>But I never really had a need to use the language, and now I absolutely resent the language. I think a large part of it had to do with the fact that I hated my mother, and so refused to speak to her in general.<p>Overall I would have been much happier if I'd gone hiking instead or doing something else. Maybe I'd still have a relationship with my mother if my life didn't feel so forced.<p>Of course, a lot of this depends on the relationship you have with your child. I assume I was just unlucky in the overall scheme of things.
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.<p>The hard part about a new language, if you intuitively understand the grammar, is <i>vocabulary</i>. The author himself admits that his own vocabulary is not expansive enough, foisting than upon a child can't possibly help. The inability to have deep conversations is deeply harmful: there are many Chinese couples in my home country that raised their children only on English, much to the detriment of their Chinese/Hokkien/Cantonese, and the parent and child are now unable to hold deep conversations about important topics, which led to big disconnects in familial relationships.<p>I don't think that this will cause long-term harm, but I do think it's a massive waste of time.<p>There is this obsession with language learning that I've never quite understood in the US. The supposed cognitive benefits have, to the best of my knowledge, mostly failed to replicate, so it only lives on as a popular myth.
We have an interesting situation: We live in Germany as a couple of German and Korean native speakers, but mostly speak English and Korean with each other. It'll fall to me to speak German to our daughter - we're a few weeks away -, which I haven't used at home (or much at all outside of work, for that matter) for a very long time. Quite a strange-feeling prospect! And we have three languages in total to think about.
My wife and I are going to end up doing this almost in reverse: We live in Finland and converse almost entirely in English with one another, and we plan to speak in English to our kids, but our kids are obviously going to speak Finnish with almost everyone else in the family and at school.<p>Luckily I think it'll be a lot easier to keep a kid engaged at home with American English thanks to all the media we have. And it really is true that Finns have exceptional English skills, way beyond what I've encountered in e.g. France or Switzerland. This has to my knowledge only become more exceptional in the youth of today.<p>It's going to be really interesting to see whether they choose to head back to the USA in a few decades to chase greater wealth and capitalize on this advantage. I love the fact that we're in a situation to offer them such unparalleled mobility between two beautiful, very different lifestyles like this.
First of all, OP's Spanish accent is really, really, good.<p>I'm doing the same thing with my children and the most difficult thing to control is the environment.<p>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.<p>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).
One way to keep kids interested in another language is to let them watch animated shows or listen to soundtrack music in that language. That helped extend our kid’s interest in Spanish, and is helping her get into Chinese.
I tried to teach my children French. We had cartoons, and I even offered to pay them to listen to daily lessons. No dice.<p>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 heaven breaking rocks, and they asked me to do it again soon. I should have known better.
We have a similar configuration at home.<p>I am from Brazil, my wife from Finland and we live in Sweden. We speak English to each other.<p>To our two and half year old daughter, we speak our native languages and she learns Swedish in daycare.<p>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.<p>We read/have plenty of books. Sweden has great libraries with many titles for the little ones, also in different languages.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>The main thing I learned is to find what interests the child and go that route. Be music, books, TV.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
My lazy guide:<p>This didn't make my daughter 100% bilingual, but she's up there.<p>We live in a spanish speaking country.
Netflix (where she sees all her cartoons and movies) has always been set in English. She's 7 now and has never asked for it to be switched to Spanish.<p>Additionally, I read to her almost every day (before bed, sometimes during the day too) and 90% of the books were in English.
It would have been tough if, for some reason, she didn't liked the English books, but since I started before she could even speak I think it came naturally to her.<p>I used to speak in English with her (and she would reply), but at some point gave up.<p>Her listening skills and reading skills are amazing (and on par with her Spanish), but her speaking ability is not quite bilingual.
i'm always a bit wary of parents treating childhood language acquisition as a project - language fluency requires practice and interest to keep up, and pushing a kid to learn a language when they don't care can be counterproductive. many of my second-generation immigrant friends are now effectively monolingual because of that.<p>personally, i was raised bilingual, switched to full english in grade school because my parents were concerned about my english skills, and now i'm in a weird limbo where i'm technically still fluent in two languages, but i have bad first language attrition in one and i'll always feel like a non-native in the other. that being said, i'm glad that i still have access to two languages, and i hope that his daughter can find continued success as she grows older.
This can backfire sometimes. My parents tried to do this with me for Italian, and it ended up causing me some problems with English, so they had to stop. I still tend to slur my words in English, although I speak very well in Italian and have been learning the language very easily.
Awesome. As someone who is bilingual, it made traveling through South America so much easier. Stay away from that Chilean Spanish though, lol. Those that have tried ordering food there will know what I mean. Too many of their nouns are completely different words from the rest of the Spanish. Never before did I feel like I wasn't understood even though technically I spoke the same language.
In my experience it's hard for a child to speak <i>both</i> languages <i>very</i> <i>well</i> if they are bilingual.<p>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.
Speaking Dutch/English/Japanese in Japan, I decided early on that teaching my son Dutch in a country where nobody speaks that language was a bad idea, so I spoke english instead.<p>Now he’s 5, and I regret that.
Sounds like a terrible idea (in general).<p>1) Too many common words with differences in their pronunciation.<p>2) I imagine a heavily English-accented Spanish. "You must be from Spain." Yeah, right.
Any language other than English at home is highly likely to end up with the kids bilingual anyway.<p>With the pervasiveness of English (yay hollywood) it comes almost naturally.
As someone who speaks several languages myself and native in Spanish and French, this is not a big deal.<p>People in my family do that all the time, each parent speak a different language, and in the school-outside they learn another.<p>As a kid you just get used to it. You are not going to become a master speaker as you will learn to speak the language but not write it as an educated person and have to choose later what do you study advance grammar and so on, but being able to read books in a language is a huge deal for getting advance grammar on your own.<p>It also makes very easy to learn new languages and opens you a lot of gates as you can basically move anywhere in the world and adapt to their view. People react differently if you speak what they speak.