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Languages for my children | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| dancinghobbit Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5658 days ago 9 posts - 11 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 25 of 32 03 June 2009 at 4:30am | IP Logged | |||||
Fear of being "odd" is not a good reason for anything. My friend who speaks French to his daughter has a great relationship with his wife (who does not understand French). It takes effort, and some people do think it's odd, but their daughter will probably appreciate it her whole life. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6013 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes  Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 26 of 32 03 June 2009 at 9:55am | IP Logged | |||||
Done properly, it is not confusing for the child. The earlier example in this thread, where a dad spoke three different languages to the child, now that is confusing, because there is no context to tell the child which language is appropriate at a given time. However, if it's split into Mummy's Language and Daddy's Language, and potentially even Family Language, there will always be clear enough context for the kid to compartmentalise the language appropriately. The only potential confusion is a brief period of generalising Mummy's Language = Women's Language, Daddy's Language = Men's Language, but this confusion only arises at the very start of conversations and clears itself up very quickly. Also, it is true that the child will have a smaller vocabulary in both languages during infancy -- they are exposed less to individual words, so it takes longer to learn them -- but studies have consistently shown that by about 8-10 years old, they overtake their monolingual peers and demonstrate a much better understanding and grasp of their languages than them. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| glorawish Pentaglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 6909 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes Speaks: English*, French, Russian, German, Spanish | Message 27 of 32 03 June 2009 at 3:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I do not usually post on this forum, however I do pop in for a read every now and again. I thought with the renewed interest in this thread I should provide an update.
On October 12th 2006 I gave birth to gorgeous twins, Maria and James. I decided that I would begin speaking with them in both French and Russian from day one, and I applied the approach that I mentioned in my first post. In the mornings I speak with them in French and after lunch we switch to Russian. As soon as their father arrives home from work we all speak in English. It didn't take too long for me to develop consistancy in this. As for my language abilities, as previously mentioned, my level of both Russian and French is very high as I have continual contact with native speakers through my line of work. Both children have been speaking more and more confidently over the past 6 months. Their English is strongest, as this is the language to which they have the most exposure, however they are also able to communicate efficiently in both Russian and French and have suprised me in how little they mix up each of the languages. I am happy with their development as their English is as good as several friends and cousins of the same age. I know it will be difficult to maintain such a level of exposure to French and Russian once they begin school. When the time comes I will have to think of another approach, yet for now I am very happy with the way things have been going and I can only think of it being an advantage for them as they get older. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| heartnsoul Triglot Groupie United States Joined 5723 days ago 45 posts - 47 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English*, Spanish Studies: Italian, German, Greek | Message 28 of 32 03 June 2009 at 3:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
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You've received some great advice here. I think its wonderful that you want to teach your child multiple languages. It will give him/her so many more advantages in life. Yes, just be aware that children who are raised in a multilingual household will tend to speak later - nothing is wrong with them, but their brain is trying to process and categorize the languages. This exact thing happened to me because in my family we speak Chinese and English - I didn't actually speak until I was almost 3. The doctor said it was normal. So just keep that in mind!
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| cordelia0507 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5840 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian | Message 29 of 32 03 June 2009 at 4:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Congrats on the twins, thanks for the update and great to hear that your approach worked out well!
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| andee Tetraglot Senior Member Japan Joined 7079 days ago 681 posts - 724 votes 3 sounds Speaks: English*, German, Korean, French | Message 30 of 32 05 June 2009 at 2:27am | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks for the update.. I was actually interested to hear whether splitting language with time was going to be effective. I had heard of switching language dependent on environment before, e.g., speaking French at home, Russian at the park. So using that as a basis may be one way of keeping the exposure up when they attend school ..Good luck :)
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| Russianbear Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6777 days ago 358 posts - 422 votes 1 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, Ukrainian Studies: Spanish | Message 31 of 32 08 June 2009 at 5:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yes, congrats on the twins, glorawish.
First, I wanted to ask if you were sure she didn't go to school in Sweden? :) It seemed unlikely to me they would offer Swedish in a Moscow school - but apparently there are schools where relatively less common languages are offered- see below.
I didn't know much about those schools myself (I did go to one, but I only attended it when I was in 1st grade, while they didn't start English until grade 2) so I did some googling. There used to be only a small number of these language schools. There are more now- and many of them are private- but if there aren't any more qualified teachers, one has to wonder just how good these schools are. I imagine their standards and quality of instruction differ greatly for from one school to another. This article : http://topschools.ru/bg_topschools.nsf/va_webpages/article_2 0081113182618 mentions over 100 such schools in Moscow, most of them are "English", while only about 10-15 specialize in German or French. (Many, especially non-English ones offer English and/or other language as a second foreign language). A handful offer Spanish, and there are one or two schools each schools that offer more exotic languages like Asian languages or Norwegian, etc. Some offer bizzare combinations - there is a boarding school that offers English from year 1 on, Hindi from year 3 on, and allows the option of learning Swedish and/or German later. I am not sure who had the bright idea of grouping Hindi with Swedish, but that's the only mention of this kind of school for Swedish I found. I think these schools pretty much follow the same flawed patterns the regular schools do, but they start earlier (around the age of 7-8 as opposed to 10-11) and do more hours per week (I guess, around 5-6 as opposed to 2-4). Some of these schools offer some of the other subjects (like chemistry) in English. Anyways, these schools probably do teach foreign languages better than regular schools do, but still, I doubt whether many of their students end up being any better than upper intermediate level. I imagine the students end up relatively proficient at reading/writing relatively simple texts - as that is pretty much what they do for several hours a week for ten years. But their speaking/listening skills are probably not that advanced. That is not to say there aren't any schools that are very good and that produce people who are fluent - but I think even if there are any, there are only a handful of such schools and they are probably elite and next to impossible to get into. So I think that girl you mentioned is an exception rather than the rule - but of course even people who go to regular schools can learn a language on their own if they are enthusiastic about it. But of course, the language school would help, too. By the way, the more elite a school is - the harder it is to get into. Some are expensive, other may have entrance exams. Even in Soviet times, they wouldn't allow just any child to study in one of those schools - they would usually have an interview and they would look for thing like better than average vocabulary in one's native language, good mental and physical health - as the curriculum in those schools was considered to be extremely challenging for children (some schools had classes 6 days a week, etc)- so they probably wouldn't take a kid with ADHD, etc. Edited by Russianbear on 16 June 2009 at 5:24pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| cordelia0507 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5840 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian | Message 32 of 32 16 June 2009 at 4:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hi Russianbear, thanks for explaining about theses schools, it's interesting to hear.
Yeah, this girl from Livemocha is a bit of a mystery. I haven't been on there a lot recently and neither has she so I haven't checked what the story is. But I will. But I checked her original message, where she mentioned these things, and admittedly she doesn't specify that she learnt Swedish IN SCHOOL. She is from Moscow and her school could have been a language school for English, I guess, and she could have learnt Swedish later. Perhaps I jumped to the wrong conclusion... We shall see. I jumped to that conclusion because it seemed to me the only way that she could have learnt Swedish so well since she is fairly young. (based on photo and being at uni) She also said (because I asked) that she has never been in Sweden, although she reads Swedish papers and blogs a lot. Perhaps one of her parents is Swedish - but if so that would have been easy for her to mention, and surely she would have visited Sweden if that was the case. The other reason she can't be Swedish is because she is a fairly serious Russian nationalist. She wrote quite a long thing to complaint that Swedish media is taking a negative view on Russia and is unfairly prejudiced, backed up by some examples. She knows stuff about Russia that only a Russian person would know and her knowledge about Sweden is coloured by her Russian perspective. Again, she wrote this entire "rant" without making a single grammatical mistake and she only vaguely mis-used a couple of words which are practically outside the average native speaker's vocabulary anyway. I don't know what to make of it. A genius, a fake or what? Perhaps she spent hours writing her messages to me, looking up everything. But you make mistakes even so, if you don't know a language. I remember hearing from my grandfather who travelled quite a bit in the USSR in the 70s - 80s that they were assigned Swedish speaking guides which he found impressive. Always very good at Swedish, female and totally charmed my grandfather -- he took lots of photos. That kind of "luxury" probably isn't available to travellers there anymore and I hope the ladies were able to find some other nice job using their language skills. But it sounds like there must be somewhere in Russia that teaches Swedish really well. Very nice! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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