I started to teach my daughter to read a few weeks ago. We are Vietnamese living in Germany, so our daughter have only learned Vietnamese so far. Her next language will be German, when we will have found a German “nanny” (few hours/week) for her. But I am not sure about teaching her reading German since I am worried what if she become an outsider in school later. We don’t want do homeschooling and at first place we like her to be sociable with other peers. In Vietnam it’s usual that children can read - more or less - before the start school, so I am less worried about teaching her reading some Vietnamese.
I am wondering in which language shall I do the Encyclcopedic knowledge stuff (I want to start with it when she can really read, maybe in 1 year!?):
ENGLISH - because it is a “science language”. There a already plenty materials and I do not have to translate and find the right word. But we are not English native speaker. And it would be hard for us to give her more information about an object in English and it would be also hard for her to understand (?).
GERMAN - I am not sure if we still live in Germany when she goes to school, but at least I can speak German fluently.
VIETNAMESE - her mother tongue, but spoken almost only by Vietnamese people. It is sometimes difficult to find the “right word” for complicated things the translation and spelling in Vietnamese wouldn’t be unified - it depends on the translater. Or they simply use English oder French word for complicated things. One example is Xingapo = Singapo = Xin Ga Po … (= Singapore).
Could anybody give me an advice?
I have read some of you do teach Encyclopedic Knowledge in serveral languages. How do you do that? Do you teach the same infomation more times then (each time in different language)?
I have the same question… I have been preparing lots of Power Point presentations for EK (Encyclopedic Knowledge). The other language(s) I would like to teach my children are DUTCH (1st choice for me), then if that is going well, French, German, maybe Spanish someday. I worry too that they might get confused between the languages especially because we don’t have native speakers in their daily lives… I understand Dutch and speak a little (not much for conversation), I learned a few years of French in highschool, my husband grew up in Germany until 13 years old but never speaks to them in German so they have only been exposed to it every weekend when his parents were still alive (until 6 years ago). I am hoping that by getting music and movies and reading lots of books in the foreign languages to them, I can make up a bit for my lack of ‘fill in’ vocabulary and proper grammar and ease of conversation. I don’t think I can expect them to become fluent speakers in this way without the motivation of having real live speakers in their life, but I hope they will still learn lots and lots and ‘grow those brains’ and that they will also be able to separate the languages and not be confused.
I have translated a couple of my presentations into Dutch (musical instruments, animal babies, planets), but other ones I don’t imagine I’ll ever translate (Masterpieces of Claude Monet, Tallest Free Standing Structures, Butterflies of Ontario) because I haven’t a clue where I’d find a translation for them or even if there is a translation for some of them. It will be much easier to translate my reading program words (I’m planning to put pictures on the backs of reading program words for two reasons… so I have them when I start foreign language more formally, and so that when the new baby comes in December I can give the baby a meaning to a word that he/she is learning to read).
Please offer any advice or opinion, any parents that have been teaching their children foreign languages using Doman methods.
This is just my personal choice. I think I’m going to do it in ther native language that is English, even though my native language is Spanish. Once I feel confortable with the program I may translated some of the categories into Spanish.
well, we live in US, so for my kids will be easy to learn english, so I teach portuguese (I’m brazilian) and spanish (my husband is from Venezuela) make a schedule, if you gonna teach 3 languages, you can teach all 3 in a day, before you show the pictures, say the language, for exemplo, "now we gonna see words in german, than you shou the word and the picture, I like to show around 3 to 5 times the same word for day, if you are teaching 3 at the same time, you gonna show 15 times in a day, 5 for languages…
the most important is: feel confident in what you are doing… and keep doing… (wherever you do it’s just fine…)
WOW I wish I could offer my child 3 languages. Thats an amazing opportunity, I would offer her alittle off all the languages focusing on what you think should be her native tongue