Choscura Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5548 days ago 61 posts - 82 votes Speaks: English*, Thai
| Message 1 of 61 23 September 2009 at 7:02pm | IP Logged |
I've got to start thinking about this soon, and I'm curious what others here have done or plan on doing in terms of raising kids to speak more than one native language. I'm kind of inspired by that classic scene in Indiana Jones where he goes in to tell his father about the thieves and his father says "count to ten first- in Greek!", but I don't have any real plans beyond this.
So: what did you do with your kids? What did your parents do with you?
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anytram Bilingual Tetraglot Groupie France Joined 5669 days ago 85 posts - 89 votes Speaks: German*, Polish*, French, English Studies: Japanese
| Message 2 of 61 23 September 2009 at 7:21pm | IP Logged |
My parents spoke Polish only with me, I learned German at kindergarden.
What I hear a lot about is in mixed-couples every one is just speaking their mother tongue, so the kid knows with whom what language to speak.
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Choscura Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5548 days ago 61 posts - 82 votes Speaks: English*, Thai
| Message 3 of 61 23 September 2009 at 7:50pm | IP Logged |
The only thing that worries me with this is when both parents speak both languages and mix them, I found a statistic the other day that showed kids growing up in families like this actually had much weaker linguistic skills than kids who spoke just one or the other language.
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yong321 Groupie United States yong321.freeshe Joined 5542 days ago 80 posts - 104 votes Studies: Spanish
| Message 4 of 61 23 September 2009 at 8:25pm | IP Logged |
Choscura wrote:
The only thing that worries me with this is when both parents speak both languages and mix them, I found a statistic the other day that showed kids growing up in families like this actually had much weaker linguistic skills than kids who spoke just one or the other language. |
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I read about it too. But it has no reference. Do you have a URL pointing at (preferably) a scientific study of this? Or just journal name and issue number?
Yong Huang
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izan Bilingual Tetraglot Newbie Spain letmewritealittlebit Joined 5869 days ago 20 posts - 34 votes 1 sounds Speaks: Spanish*, Basque*, EnglishC1, FrenchC1 Studies: German
| Message 5 of 61 23 September 2009 at 11:27pm | IP Logged |
My father spoke Basque to me and my mother Spanish, so it was easy for me to learn both of them. About mixing languages, one friend of mine and her husband are doing that. Apparently, they choose one language randomly each time... We'll have to wait to see the results because their child is still too young, but it sounds like a bad idea to me.
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Felipe Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6030 days ago 451 posts - 501 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Italian, Dutch, Catalan
| Message 6 of 61 24 September 2009 at 1:17am | IP Logged |
We are teaching our children both Spanish and Portuguese. My wife, who is from Brazil, only speaks Portuguese with the kids and I only speak Spanish. The real key is consistency. No matter what, we do not speak English to them. We make them put their DVDs in Spanish or Portuguese. My daughter, who is now 5 years old, can speak English, Spanish and Portuguese very well and she does not mix them at all.
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Glendonian Bilingual Diglot Newbie Canada Joined 5717 days ago 26 posts - 37 votes Speaks: French*, English* Studies: German, Italian
| Message 7 of 61 24 September 2009 at 8:01am | IP Logged |
I guess it looks like the key is each parents speaking only one. I'm yet another example; my father spoke
exclusively French to us and we virtually always spoke English with our mother. We all became flawless
bilinguals.
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Glendonian Bilingual Diglot Newbie Canada Joined 5717 days ago 26 posts - 37 votes Speaks: French*, English* Studies: German, Italian
| Message 8 of 61 24 September 2009 at 8:02am | IP Logged |
I guess it looks like the key is each parents speaking only one. I'm yet another example; my father spoke
*exclusively* French to us and we virtually always spoke English with our mother. We all became flawless bilinguals.
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