I see that many of you do this.
Does it gets the child confused? We are a bilingual family. I speak english, DH french. My kids understand everything in english, but for a reason I don’t get they don’t talk much.
I would like to add spanish on top of that. How do I go about using brillkids english and french, and add spanish lesson on top?
Thank you!
We teach 4 languages ( and adding the 5th) – English, Russian, Chinese, Spanish and considering adding French ( just trying it out now) – with young children the amount of languages introduced really does not matter that much, their brains are literally wired for learning and they are linguistic geniuses. Lots of parents I know using OPOL (One parent one language approach) which is great. Unfortunately we were not consistent enough with that and we simply use different languages at different times of the day for different activities. We use LR for English, Mandarin and French. We use Little Pim for Mandarin and Spanish. They watch educational programs in English, Russian and Mandarin and they have outside activities that are conducted in Spanish (ballet classes, sports and we have a regular play date in Spanish). Some programs they watch we make available only in one language ( not English), so if they want to watch it, they have to watch it in that language, it works great!
Both of our kids were very early and very eloquent talkers, so multilingual environment did not make them into late talkers, our 3rd one is only 6 months.
Thank you for your reply.
Do you tell your lids that this is english, and this is spanish, or do you just go ahead switching without saying anything?
It depends:
If we are about to do LR lesson in Mandarin, Russian or French, I usually would say that – not because they would not know otherwise, but rather of a habit or as an introduction. They always know instanly which language it is though
If we are about to watch new program in other language, I would say something like this, “We are going to learn about baby animals, and the story will be in Russian” or “We are going to dance and sing in Chinese, with chinese childen” (They love sing and learn Chinese with Mei Mei program :yes: and constantly sing songs from it, when they playing independently)
in the situation when we have a visitor, who speaks one of the languages they know, they are not introduced to it in any special way, they just listen and try to participate. Also, often when they see book or newspaper on one of the languages, they would casually mention “Mommy can we read this Russian book” or “Look, this is Chinese newspaper”. It just seems to be not a big deal for them.
My kids are not fluent in all the languages ( I feel I should mention that), but that was not my goal, while it would be awesome if they would be at some point, at this moment my goal is to give them the “linguistic ear” so to speak for the languages they might find useful and would like to learn more deeply later in life. It is much easier to do it during 0-6 year window, and we are aiming at it. Fluency would come as they practice, listen and read…
In my opinion, babies do not know about the languages when they were born. What they recognize are just sounds. When they hear people speaking in a particular language, the babies are just hear it as a sound with a certain pattern. In their mind, they don’t have any clue if the sounds are called English, Mandarin, French, or any other languages. Not until we inform them so.
When introducing multiple languages at the same time, I suggest that we speak to our babies clearly and not too fast. Do not mix one language with the other when speaking in complete sentence(s) as eventually we expect our child to speak correctly in that language. Leaving in South East Asia, our local language here is not English or Mandarin. However, we introduced English to our son (3 years old now) as his first language. We introduced Mandarin next, and our local language, Indonesia, last. Indonesian language is more like Spanish, I think. We never taught our son to read in Indonesia, but somehow he found his own way reading it. We still have to lead him with the grammar as it is not the same as English. The interesting thing happen is that sometimes he translates our question from one language to the other instead of answering it. What we are paying attention is when he is pronouncing our local language. If he pronounce it incorrectly, then we must inform him immediately and correct it.
I agree that fluency would come as our children practice, listen, and read. After all, the limit is not on our babies, but it is more on us as the parents…
What a great job, BNB with introducing two foreign languages from the very start! Thank you for sharing your experience!