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Raising multilingual children | ||
Tags: Children | Multilingual | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Felipe Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6031 days ago 451 posts - 501 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Italian, Dutch, Catalan | Message 9 of 24 27 May 2008 at 4:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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My daughter (almost 4 years old) is learning Spanish and Portuguese at home and English outside the home. She has no problem separating the three. She knows that she speaks Spanish to me, Portuguese to my wife and English to grandma. She easily recognizes when someone else speaks one of the three and naturally uses that language.
An example: I show her an apple and ask her in Spanish what it's called. She responds, "manzana." "What does mom call it?" "Maçã." "What does grandma call it?" "Apple." Although I'm speaking Spanish the whole time she knows that mom and grandma speak different languages and use different words. This doesn't only happen with individual words, but entire sentences as well. Kids are amazing! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| CaoMei513 Senior Member United States Joined 6846 days ago 110 posts - 113 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin, Korean | Message 10 of 24 09 August 2008 at 7:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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Sorry to bring up an old topic, but I have an important question about raising bi-lingual children: Alot of people say that it is generally better when one person only uses one language with the child (eg. the mother only uses English and the father only uses Spanish), but is it possible if the parents/relatives use more than one language with the child? I dont have kids yet and I wont for a while, but if I want to raise them to be Mandarin-English bilingual, will I have to pick just one of those languages to use with them and let the father use the other??
Thanks for any replies! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Felipe Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6031 days ago 451 posts - 501 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Italian, Dutch, Catalan | Message 11 of 24 11 August 2008 at 9:43am | IP Logged | ||
This is exactly what we're doing with my daughter. She just turned 4 last week and speaks English, Spanish and Portuguese. The main thing to keep in mind is 100% consistency. I only speak Spanish with my daughter, never English, never Portuguese. And my wife only speaks Portuguese to her, never Spanish, never English. We only buy DVDs that have a Spanish or Portuguese language track. I purchased a bunch of kids' books in Spanish and always read with her. Most of her friends are either Hispanics or Brazilians. She gets plenty of English at my parents' house and with her cousins. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| alfajuj Diglot Senior Member Taiwan Joined 6212 days ago 121 posts - 126 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Taiwanese, French | Message 12 of 24 12 August 2008 at 8:33am | IP Logged | ||
I have two bilingual daughters now 10 and 14. I have always spoken English with them, while their mother spoke Mandarin. It was difficult for me in the early years because for a long time, my elder daughter would reply to me in Mandarin, even though I had spoken English. But I didn't give up and eventually it all clicked. They are both now fully bilingual, even though their Mandarin is stronger, due to the environment of living in Taiwan. Their Taiwanese is passable also, since their grandparents don't speak Mandarin. The parents should speak his or her respective native languages with the children for it to work. (I don't know how well it would work with a parent's second language, but I doubt it would work unless you were very advanced). Looking back, my wife should have spoken Taiwanese with the kids and then let them learn their Mandarin from the the environment (school, TV etc.) They seem less interested in learning Taiwanese now. It seems to have less prestige in their eyes. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Olympia Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5982 days ago 195 posts - 244 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Old English, French | Message 13 of 24 12 August 2008 at 8:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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For awhile now, I've been interested in bilingual children, and hope one day to raise my own children (should I have
them) with more than one language. The one parent, one language technique seems to be the most common, and seems to work well. I've been reading a website called Bilingual Wiki for awhile now. The "Journal from the Trenches" section follows a mother who is teaching her two children Portuguese, her second language. Her husband doesn't speak Portuguese, and they live in the US, so the children are exposed far more to English than Portuguese. She seems to think that if only two languages are in play, that if both parents speak the minority language, it's better that they both use the language with the children at home to give the children more exposure, even if both parents are not native speakers of the minority language. The more exposure the children get to to the minority language the better, in my opinion. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| parasitius Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5999 days ago 220 posts - 323 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Cantonese, Polish, Spanish, French | Message 14 of 24 26 September 2008 at 4:35am | IP Logged | ||
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I had always envied those who had gotten another tongue since birth, even if it was an
imperfect or only partial command, especially if it was an exotic specimen such as Cantonese. While one could surely learn Cantonese in adulthood, he could do so only with the understanding that there is precious little hope of ever being able to pronounce it perfectly in all of its seven tone-laden glory. Ever since I learned about the "cost" of multilingualism, however, I am a lot less certain that my situation of being monolingual by birth is regretful. Have any of you given consideration to the fact, which I myself have only recently become aware, that multilinguals often lack a mother tongue in the strictest sense of having a "perfect sense of grammar" for even the most convoluted of sentences and thus can never aspire work as professional translators? In the worst cases, such as has affected one of my friends, there is no near-native language at all. My friend was born of Chinese parents and raised in Korea speaking both Mandarin and Korean. At some point in the middle he was moved to the USA and thrown into an almost strictly English environment. He forgot all of his Korean from non-use. Further, he never spoke Chinese at a high level for not having been educated in that language, though it is what he uses to communicate with his parents. He also somehow managed to incompletely acquire English due to the late start, and while he has no problems communicating, his speech is not terribly grammatical and is somewhat affected. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6440 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 15 of 24 26 September 2008 at 5:30am | IP Logged | ||
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The situation parasitius outlines is sad, but it's not a given. A good friend of mine has 4 native languages, although he claims to be illiterate in the most unusual (and first) of them, which is also the only non-IE language he speaks. The 4th is English, which he started acquiring in elementary school. His English is much better than mine, in every way - he's corrected my pronunciation of unusual words, has a much better understanding of formal grammar, and simply writes more elegantly as well.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Budz Octoglot Senior Member Australia languagepump.com Joined 6374 days ago 118 posts - 171 votes Speaks: German*, English, Russian, Esperanto, Ukrainian, Mandarin, Cantonese, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Korean, Portuguese, Bulgarian, Persian, Hungarian, Kazakh, Swahili, Vietnamese, Polish | Message 16 of 24 26 September 2008 at 8:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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parasitius writes as though this is what happens to bilingual children. Not true! He cites one example as if that is the norm. I grew up bilingual in English and German and my English is in fact better than monolinguals as I have a much better feeling for language due to the fact that I know two.
Parasitius example is like saying: 'I have a friend who's father is a professional golfer and he was taught to play golf as a child. I learnt golf as an adult. I play golf much better than my friend that learnt as a child therefore I'm happy that I never learnt golf as a child because then I wouldn't play as well as I do now'. I would suspect that the truth is that most professional translators are bilinguals and in fact the best translators were bilingual as children. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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