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Advice on Spanish and French/German/Por.. | ||
Tags: Professionals | Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6385 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes  4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 33 of 91 09 September 2012 at 4:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
Don't plan so much in advance;) There's still the possibility that your future wife won't speak Spanish, so then it would make sense to send them to a Spanish immersion school. And learning to read/write Spanish would be something trivial for them. And if your wife does speak Spanish, she may feel two languages are enough, which you'd better respect. Get a wife before planning things for your children:) 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| patuco Diglot Moderator Gibraltar Joined 6803 days ago 3795 posts - 4268 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Personal Language Map | Message 34 of 91 10 September 2012 at 1:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
Ideal answer: By devising an amazing time management system to enable them to maximise their few precious moments of free time ultra-efficiently and to actually gain time in otherwise "dead" moments. Realistic answer: Not much studying happens, it's sporadic at best.
...and prepare to relinquish all control over their upbringing! Edited by patuco on 10 September 2012 at 1:08pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| justonelanguage Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4250 days ago 98 posts - 128 votes Speaks: English, Spanish | Message 35 of 91 10 September 2012 at 2:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Oh, I knew that you weren't advocating raising monolingual kids. However, it is well borne out by the FSI that Chinese, Arabic, and Asian languages are 3-4 times harder than romance languages for English speakers. I know VERY few americans that speak very good Chinese. I do know a few americans that speak excellent Spanish, however.
My idea is that if they are exposed to Mandarin at age 2, for example, they don't even have to learn or do anything, they just absorb the language. It's important because I'm Chinese, even though Mandarin isn't our family language!
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6385 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 36 of 91 10 September 2012 at 4:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
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They won't absorb the writing system. Kids of any native language spent at least some time learning to write - it's just much easier if the language at least uses an alphabet, like also Russian or Arabic.
As they won't have any family members that speak Mandarin to them, chances are they won't be fully proficient. You'd need a lot of additional materials, like cartoons and music in Mandarin, and later movies and comic books when they grow up. Between ALSO giving them media in Spanish and the kids just wanting what their peers like ie American media... I don't think it's a good idea. They might end up hating it:( Or if you're so eager to teach them Mandarin, you have to be okay with the fact that they might not do as well in Spanish as you'd want them to. With a Spanish-speaking mother, they would of course understand Spanish, but getting them to speak it would be more of a challenge, especially if their maternal relatives also speak English. Truly multilingual kids usually just HAVE to use several languages in their daily life, it should be more than the parents' choice. Actually, it might even be hard enough to convince your wife to speak Spanish to the kids! If teaching your kids Mandarin is important for you, learn it yourself first. This way you'll be there to speak to them and to help them with reading/writing. Basically, it's true that kids can absorb a language easily. But they also forget what they don't need. Look for information online about raising bilingual/trilingual children to have a more realistic idea of what it takes. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4495 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 37 of 91 10 September 2012 at 4:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've known people that were raised bilingual and even more than that. Some of them
suffered a bit under it but some others ended up being raised in such a way that fluency in 5(!) languages was attainable. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6385 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 38 of 91 10 September 2012 at 4:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It's much easier to do in a non-English speaking country though :) The major local language(s) would be easy and English is everywhere and considered cool, so that's 2 or 3 languages with very little effort. Leaves more "space" for an additional language.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| justonelanguage Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4250 days ago 98 posts - 128 votes Speaks: English, Spanish | Message 39 of 91 10 September 2012 at 5:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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What about this: I speak Spanish (my children will *definitely* know Spanish from me) in the home and if my wife speaks another language, she speaks to our future children in the other one. (French, Italian, Chinese, whatever) I can also speak English to them so they get a head start in school.
Then, when they get to school, they speak English all the time. I'm basing it just off my experience, although I've heard of other people with my same situation, that didn't know any English at age 4, 5, or 6 and then became native speakers. At the end of my kindergarten evaluations, I had trouble with some sounds, but am obviously a full-blown native speaker in English.
2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 4918 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 40 of 91 10 September 2012 at 6:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
It's all fine and good to plan out your kids' future, but realize that life rarely goes the way you intend it to go. You're talking about a future that still doesn't include a wife (or even a significant other - you don't know what language she'll speak.) Everything you're talking about could change or not materialize at all, because these things don't even exist yet in your life. At this point in your life, why not concentrate on the original emphasis of the thread: how to improve your own languages? R. == 9 persons have voted this message useful |
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