Although I mention parents specifically in the title, this isn’t just for parents to respond.

My wife and I are trying to raise our child to be bilingual (English and Portuguese). Currently we’re both speaking a bit of both to our child and when they eventually go to school we’ll speak more Portuguese as they’ll be exposed to English everywhere else.

Is this a good approach or is there something we can do better?

  • Mad_Punda.de
    5•5 months ago

    I have a two year old. I speak German, partner speaks French, we speak English to each other (but not the kid), and we live in Sweden, so the kid’s learning Swedish at the daycare.

    So it’s 4 languages (3 that we teach plus English) and the one parent one language approach.

    Kid was a bit slow to start speaking, but now he understands a lot in all 3 languages, learns new words in all 3 all the time, and even picks up a bit of English occasionally. He’s started to distinguish the languages too, depending on who he talks to, but it’s definitely usually still a mix of all languages. When he speaks Swedish to me, I either just reply in German, or I might repeat what he said but in German first. And when he asks for his favorite lullaby in French, I just tell him in can’t do that one. We also have books in the different languages, but we might just use them in either language and describe what’s happening instead of reading it out.

    And I’m told this mixing improves over time, I’m not worried at all. So I would say this approach works really well for us.

    If you mix the languages between both parents, I think (but that’s just my gut feeling), the kid will have an easier time distinguishing the languages later on if you associate some activities with a specific language. Could be a place where you always use one language. Or some books, etc.
    But, I doubt that’s a must. Kids are astonishingly good at learning languages (I’m so jealous).

    • Badly Drawn Unicorn
      1•5 months ago

      Same for me but exchange French with Russian.

      I think one thing I feel we should have done different is to tell the kid I don’t understand you if you are not talking my language. All of us know a bit of the other languages, which was super helpful as my wife didn’t have to translate when she talks to our baby about something.

      But the downside over time was that our child after being in daycare would start speaking Swedish to us, and seeing as a toddler doesn’t pronounce words correctly we had a hell of time understanding that as non-native speakers. Lots of frustration in that one. So maybe it would have been better from the start to act as if we understand no Swedish at all.

      Counterpoint, being outside we of course have to understand what others say to us in Swedish, so that might have looked weird for the kid then.

      But what worked so far is that I speak my mother tongue, my wife hers, and our child mostly speaks Swedish since that’s the main language surrounding her. She understands all we say but is not great at speaking either our languages right now.