When your child speaks a language you don’t

I have a friend who grew up in a home where her mom and grandma spoke to her only in Spanish and her dad only spoke to her in English. She was surprised when she went to Kindergarten and her teacher spoke English. She thought Spanish was what women spoke and that English was for men.

I&#x27;m German, and speak that with my son. My son&#x27;s mother is French, and she uses that with my son. She and I speak English when we converse. He goes to a bilingual French&#x2F;English nursery school, which has mostly French expats&#x27; kids in it, and (happily) four kids that also speak German.<p>We never really discussed this when my son was born - it just happened, because doing it any other way was alien enough to not enter our heads. Seems to be the norm in Europe.<p>Yes, I struggle with French (his mum&#x27;s German is pretty reasonable). I have a secret weapon though - I&#x27;m also native-fluent in Afrikaans, which I use when I scrape a shin, drive angry, or tease.<p>Being fluent in three languages never seemed like a big deal - my mother spoke <i>seven</i>. It <i>is</i> a big deal when you speak to a Brit about it, or to an American. I guess when you&#x27;re used to chicken, beef might seem a little odd.

This is almost OK. Wait until you have twin boys, like me. They are 20 months now, grown at home, no day care ( KiTa as in Germany ;Kindergarden is later on).<p>They don&#x27;t speak, but very few words with a meaning ( mama, papa, apa ). But! Here it comes: they speak between them and communicate using a almost invented language. The language is so strange, because is based on using the same word ( twin 1 uses &#x27;bahdi&#x27;, twin 2 &#x27;budji&#x27; - approx phonetic rendering), repeatedly but changing tonality, like in cantonese. It&#x27;s really amazing to see how they can talk each other and coordinate while playing for hours using this language, me and my wife feel we are completly left out :).

My wife is a native French speaker, and she&#x27;s always spoken French to the kids. Unlike the author of this story, I&#x27;ve never really felt like I was getting left behind.<p>Before the kids were born, I spent a while studying an Assimil course (a fine course, from a French publisher, for people who like to learn mostly through osmosis with some notes). Afterwards, I plowed my way through 450 pages of a French non-fiction book, understanding maybe 75%. So when my wife started speaking French to the kids, I could kinda-sorta follow.<p>Several years later, I decided to improve my French. I forced myself to speak it as much as possible, and I read another 10,000 pages (about 40 novels&#x27; worth). I also bought DVD box sets of easy series and watched them straight through. Happily, my brain decided, &quot;Oh, so it&#x27;s French or nothing. Better learn some French, then.&quot;<p>Today I watch French TV and read French novels without much trouble. I can converse with French preschoolers, but adult conversation is a bit tricker—my spoken vocabulary is more like that of a bookish 9-year-old than that of an educated adult. On a good day, this doesn&#x27;t slow me down much. I could probably work as a programmer in French, but I&#x27;d have trouble negotiating a consulting deal without more immersion.<p>Ironically, I currently speak French better than my kids do, because I get more exposure. Given the right environment, the brain seems to adapt.

I&#x27;m going to share this in case someone finds it useful...<p>I am Canadian and married to a Spanish women and living in Spain. While my son started out sponging up both languages, he eventually took off in Spanish and left English behind. In order to have some form of relationship with him I had to speak Spanish with him.<p>People would lecture me, &quot;oh, give him that gift of English&quot; or &quot;how can you not be speaking English to him?&quot;.<p>Now that he is older and has discovered the Internet, he has a need to learn English. And he&#x27;s learned. I&#x27;m sure it was there all along, he went from not speaking English to speaking it in about two weeks.<p>My wife and I would speak English around him, and sometimes I would speak English to him, but it really wasn&#x27;t until he needed to, like the child in the OP story, that he learned English.

<p><pre><code> Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life&#x27;s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth. </code></pre> ...<p><a href="http://www.katsandogz.com/onchildren.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.katsandogz.com&#x2F;onchildren.html</a>

I kept waiting for the payoff from the title. It never arrived. It&#x27;s not the language her daughter speaks at daycare, it&#x27;s that she&#x27;s at daycare. That&#x27;s the cause of this. Same thing happened to my son and he went to an English-speaking daycare. They grow apart from you, for a reason.

I&#x27;m the kid of parents who didn&#x27;t speak my nursery&#x27;s language, and the parent of a kid who also speaks a different language at nursery.<p>It&#x27;s really not a big deal. They may speak a little slower, but they get it. I was a little worried a few months ago when my kids wasn&#x27;t speaking well, but it&#x27;s come on very suddenly.<p>One thing I think about is immersion. When I was a kid, there was only one TV station, and it showed stuff in Danish. You couldn&#x27;t get away from learning the language when you spent all day speaking it with other kids, and then going home and watching TV in the same language. Nowadays, you can get TV in just about any language you like. I wonder if it makes a difference.

I can speak two other languages fluently, but I live in England and neither of those two other languages are native. As such, my infant son rarely hears them.<p>I know others in my situation who have given up, resigning themselves to being able to help with language homework.<p>I&#x27;m tempted to push on though, much like the (possibly misguided) attempts of a man to speak to his son only in Klingon for the first three years of his life in the 90s.<p>I have already accepted that the result will be along the lines of my son having a passing familiarity with the sounds and basics of the two languages. Better than nothing.<p>--<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon_Language_Institute#d.27Armond_Speers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Klingon_Language_Institute#d.2...</a> &#x2F;&#x2F; <a href="http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/7.08/mustread.html?pg=8" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.wired.com&#x2F;wired&#x2F;archive&#x2F;7.08&#x2F;mustread.html?pg...</a>

The sentence, &quot;The truth is this: I think Noa is raising us as much as we are raising her.&quot; and the paragraph it heads really resonated with me as a parent of a young child.<p>Upon seeing the title, I expected the article to be about the unknown languages infants sometimes seem to invent. We speak two languages to our son, but my wife and I both understand each language quite well. Our son was very vocal as an infant, but less than half of his words were English or Portuguese. He&#x27;s nearly three now, but he&#x27;ll still use some of his invented words to unnecessarily lengthen phrases. I imagine this is to mimic adults who express themselves with more words. He may believe that longer phrases are given more consideration as he tends to do this more often when making a request with a small chance of success, like asking for another treat after being told he can only have one.

Reminds me a story a friend and former coworker told me. She&#x27;s of Cambodian descent, and whenever she has to talk to her mom, her mom can only understand her English if she affects this incredibly thick Cambodian accent.<p>I always found that interesting, having to put on a fake accent so people can understand you.

My wife is Japanese, I&#x27;m Israeli, and we both live in Berin, where our son was born. We talk to him in our native language, and between us in English. He goes to the Kita, where they speak only German...<p>He&#x27;s still fairly young (17 months), so doesn&#x27;t really talk much, but we can spot a few German words (Ja! Nein). He does seem to understand Hebrew and Japanese when we talk to him, and says one or two words in Hebrew (Aba, means Dad) and in Japanese (Wanwan, means Dog).<p>We&#x27;re very curious on how things will evolve from here. It&#x27;s very likely that his German will be his strongest. But we&#x27;re sure he will understand and can speak with us. Our biggest hope is that he can help translate German for us though ;-)

I know this situation too well. It gets worse when child is asking for pacifier, favorite tv show, playground etc. Also child does not pronounce clearly, and its very hard to understand for non-native speaker.<p>I wonder why author had not learned German in advance, they had almost 2 years time. English speaker can pickup German in 5 months, very similar and easy language.

It seems there may also be an additional (and potentially larger) cultural element here that goes beyond language, though it would be less pronounced at such an elementary age. Further, it would be interesting to explore how this family&#x27;s experience maps to first-generation American families in the US.

My 18 month old daughter has a full time nanny who has spoken to her only in Spanish (at our request) since she was 3 months old; my wife and I speak to her only in English, and we don&#x27;t speak any Spanish. It&#x27;s been really fascinating to see what my daughter chooses to say in Spanish instead of English: always agua (her first word), siéntate (&quot;sit&quot;), mas (&quot;more&quot;), wacala (spanish slang for &quot;yucky&quot; - for poop)... other words, she can interchange depending on who she speaks to. Sometimes I can&#x27;t understand her, and can&#x27;t tell if she&#x27;s trying to tell me something in Spanish, or her diction just isn&#x27;t good enough yet. I suspect it&#x27;s the latter, I think she&#x27;s already adept enough at recognizing mommy and daddy don&#x27;t speak Spanish...

If you want to read up more on this, look up third culture kids. The wikipedia page is a good start.

&gt;Viennese daycares—known here as kindergartens—have a very long Eingewöhnungszeit—literally translated as “getting adjusted period” or &quot;acclimatization.&quot; Dropping your kid off on Day One while she shrieks &quot;MOMMY!&quot; is looked upon as child abuse.<p>I went over this in Germany (living here since 10 years) and it is just ridiculous. During my second child &quot;acclimatization&quot; after seeing a mother in tears and making progress for her absence in intervals of 5 minutes each day, I realize this long &quot;acclimatization&quot; period was for them, not for the child.

My children (ages 5 and 3) were born and raised in Germany. We only speak spanish at home. They both went to day-care very early.<p>Today they speak like natives. When they play alone or between them, they do it in german, and while I defend myself in german quite good, he corrects me all the time, especially with the right pronunciation.<p>Sad true is, lot of people, including educators are ignorant about multilinguism. They did at some point ask me and my wife to speak german at home with them because they were behind with the language.<p>I will not even mention stupid ideas politicians have had about the topic.

I suffer from the opposite problem: my mother speaks a language I don&#x27;t. She is French, but despite giving me a French name never spoke to me in French while I was growing up. She&#x27;d speak to her family in French, but never to me or my brother.<p>I&#x27;ve studied to B2 level on my own and managed to osmose a fair ability to distinguish words and sounds, but I&#x27;ll never be able to get the native-level fluency I could have. It&#x27;s something we both regret.

As a parent of a bilingual 18 month old, my experience is totally different. I speak english most of my day at work, my son speaks english at daycare, and we speak french together at home. When I get to daycare he immediately switches to french and this feels like we have a shared secret. I left a CD of french songs at the daycare and they play it when he needs soothing.<p>I think this boils down to the fact that I think of myself as an immigrant, not an expat.

tl;dr: being a parent is totally different from what you plan to be as a parent<p>(and that&#x27;s actually awesome)

Does anyone else think it kind of shameful that the author could live in Austria for 12 years and still speak such poor German? Now you can&#x27;t understand everything your child is saying. Congrats.

Kindergarten isn&#x27;t day care. Kindertagesstätte (or KiTa for short) are day care. Kindergarten is equivalent to pre-school.

I don&#x27;t understand the authors point of view.<p>My toddler is teaching me Spanish.<p>I am not being left behind, I am simply catching up.