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Bilingual kids in a non-native household | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Tollpatchig Senior Member United States Joined 4012 days ago 161 posts - 210 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Maltese | Message 1 of 26 08 December 2013 at 4:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't have any kids and really don't plan on any (but who knows what the future holds?) but if I did have kids, I would ideally like to raise them with German in the home as I hope to be at native or near-native fluency if/when I get pregnant. But is it a good idea for a non-native speaker to raise their kids in the target language?
It's already odd for someone with no German roots such as myself to be learning the language anyways and to teach to my maybe-children would seem even more strange. On top of that the child would pick up on my very American accent. Could it still work out? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Via Diva Diglot Senior Member Russian Federation last.fm/user/viadivaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4239 days ago 1109 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German, Italian, French, Swedish, Esperanto, Czech, Greek | Message 2 of 26 08 December 2013 at 4:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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Interesting question, I must say, I'll wait for some answers too. It seems that I'll have to do it with English, and if I'll be extra lucky, I need to know if I can try to add German to the mix.
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| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4712 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 3 of 26 08 December 2013 at 5:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm certainly going to teach my children English.
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| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5325 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 4 of 26 08 December 2013 at 5:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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According to the PROZ Multilingual families forum, some dedicated couples even managed to raise their children in three or more languages and some hard-core Esperantists even raise their children as native Esperanto speakers, but this requires a lot of effort.
I've met many German/English couples who had a hard time convincing their children to speak the language not natively spoken in the country that they lived in once the children reached Kindergarten age. I've often heard US born children with German mothers request that she (and others) speak English with them and children'll often speak only English among themselves and answer German questions in English. I.e. it can be done, but it'd require a lot of determination. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Sunja Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6090 days ago 2020 posts - 2295 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 5 of 26 09 December 2013 at 5:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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It's difficult to always maintain the discipline to speak the target language but it can be done, as doitsujin says. I think Professor A. Arguelles raised his kids to speak French (without being in France).
The important thing is to maintain one or the other language and not switch back and forth. I have three kids, my husband and I are both American and we try our best to raise our kids German here. They're all bilingual now but when they were younger they each went through a phase where they mixed German and English up constantly. This was happening because my husband and I would switch languages. I was then encouraged by their teachers to speak all German and not "switch". My husband stayed with English. My native language just flows without even having to think about what I'm saying, but with non-native German, I always had to concentrate on sounding as natural as possible. For the most part it worked, but there were times when it just didn't sound natural. It can be exhausting, too. You start to relish speaking in your native-tongue just so you don't have to always maintain that discipline. Now I speak mostly English in the home unless my kids start speaking German first. They've sorted the two languages out now and my oldest is working on a third (French). 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5267 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 6 of 26 09 December 2013 at 5:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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I just saw this 5 Ways to Raise Bilingual Kids When You Don't Speak the Language via the Transparent Language Blog and twitter.
As usual, you actually have to work really hard at it. They won't learn "with ease".
Edited by iguanamon on 09 December 2013 at 5:58pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Γρηγόρη Tetraglot Groupie United States Joined 4460 days ago 55 posts - 154 votes Speaks: English*, Greek, Latin, Ancient Greek Studies: German, French, Russian | Message 7 of 26 09 December 2013 at 8:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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It is difficult and requires much discipline, but is certainly possible. Although I learned Modern Greek as an
adult, I have been raising my children (now 9, 7, 3, and 1) bilingual in Greek and English. I speak only Greek to the children, and my wife speaks English to them (we live in the U.S.). It started off as an experiment, but now seems perfectly normal. I constantly catch myself speaking Greek to other people's children, because now I associate children with Greek. My children speak only Greek back to me (with allowances for throwing in the occasional English word for which they do not know the Greek equivalent). Their Greek was good enough that, when we had the opportunity to spend a year in Greece a while back, our older two children attended public school with no difficulties. I will be the first to admit that, had I simply attempted to do this on my own, it would have failed. Fortunately, we have many Greek friends, and our children have the opportunity to speak with them and their children regularly. Also, our children have attended an afternoon immersion Greek school since pre-school days (our three-year-old just joined the elder siblings). Add to the mix several trips to Greece, and we have been able to pull it off. My children simply know that they must speak Greek if they want a response from me. I find very often that efforts to pass on a language to children (whether by natives or non-natives) often fail because the parent overestimates how much of the language s/he actually speaks with the child. I know many who will swear that they speak in the target language with the child, but really it amounts mostly to basic commands, chit-chat, etc. Actual conversations occur less frequently in the target language. I was so insistent upon Greek that each of our children have believed, usually up until the age of about 4, that I don't know English, even though they heard me speak English every day with their mother. I created this illusion by: - only speaking Greek to the children - acting as though I didn't understand when they spoke English - only reading them books in Greek (if it's a simple children's book, I translated on the fly; for more difficult material, I simply said that I can't/don't read English books) - insisting that a certain amount of their television viewing be in Greek (usually weekends were dedicated to Greek television) Now it's something of a family joke that the kids play along with. I still tell the older children that I don't understand things, and they try to convince me that I do. But they argue with me in Greek. 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Tollpatchig Senior Member United States Joined 4012 days ago 161 posts - 210 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Maltese | Message 8 of 26 09 December 2013 at 9:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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It seems like I would have my work cut for me. I don't know if I would have: 1) a husband who would be
willing to allow me to teach our child German (unless I marry a German or Austrian) or 2) a husband at all. Also there's the problem of it getting too much English influence from the outside world. Hm..it would be interesting to try and I think I'd do it...I just need to find Germans and Austrians to hang around. I do love the way Tetra trolled his kids, lol. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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