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I'm not bilingual, but most of my friends are because their parents only speak English as a second language (if any at all). As far as I can tell, they learned two languages similar to how you are planning to teach your baby. Only the second language (korean, chinese, arabic, etc) was spoken at home and they learned English from outside sources, such as school or play dates.
Even though many of my friends were born in the US, quite a few didn't learn English until they were sent off to schooL!
Some of my cousins are raising their kids bilingual. For the 3 sets with kids that are being raised bilingual, they both work, so they hired a nanny that speaks the language that they want to be the child's second language. (2 hired Spanish-speaking nannies and the other hired a french-speaking nanny.) I think this is a great idea, and I hope to do it with any future children I have.
I have a co-worker raising her child much like this. Little kids are sponges for language. From her experience, the only tough thing is that the kid won't always know which language is which. The word for door is just the word for door, whether i English of French. Takes some patience from the non-speaking parent.
The other issue is that the second language will drop off once he or she goes to school. If you aren't teaching him or her how to write and don't send him or her to an immersion school, it could be a long time until reading and writing are established. On the other hand, it is always easier to learn a language you had exposure to as a child.
I have a friend who is doing this. Their plan is for one parent to speak exclusively in one language to the baby and the other parent to speak in exclusively the other language. The mother told me that this helps the baby learn that these are two different languages, rather than getting all the words confused and trying to speak some hybrid language. At first the child learns them as "mommy talk" and "daddy talk", but later will understand which words are French (or whatever) and which are English without much trouble.
I've heard the best way to do it is as greenleafmountain suggested. I don't have any experience with it myself but I would love to do it when I have kids. If only I spoke better Spanish!
Marie-Eve, who used to be on here quite a bit, might have some good insight.
One of my former lab assistants is of Cuban descent and she is teaching her baby Spanish and English. He is 1 years old now and seems to be learning both languages with ease.
I think that Mr and Mrs Bee are raising their son as a bilingual baby.
I don't have any suggestions but I just want to say that I was raised like this, and I as I get older, it's something that I am really grateful for. My father spoke to me in Spanish exclusively for my entire life, and to this day, it's really weird for me to hear him speaking English. My mom, spoke to me in Greek. I didn't really speak English until I was school age. My mom of course taught me the English alphabet, and the basics, so I could keep up.
Greenleafmountain pointed out concerns about a hybrid language, and I agree. When I was really young, I remember speaking to some people in my language and realizing they didn't understand (I was very young and I remember coming to the conclusion that not everyone talks like me), or mixing in a Greek or Spanish word into a a conversation, but I picked up on it quickly and adapted. That's the great thing about being a kid, they don't miss a beat!
Good luck with everything!!
We are both monolingual but the schools around us are French bilingual schools (starting at age 3 all the way through high school). I'm hoping our (future, hypothetical) children are able to attend those schools and benefit from them - I think it's great for children.
DH has distant cousins, he's English and married a French woman and they live in France. Their two little boys are fluent in both - dad can speak French but has spoken English enough to the boys that they picked it up just fine, although French would be considered their "first" language I guess as it seems to come more naturally. It was just gorgeous sitting at the dinner table with them and everyone spoke English but sometimes the boys would lapse into French - mum or dad would gently remind them "English in front of grandma" and the boys would say "sorry grandma" and continue their story in English. Just mind boggling seeing how it works in practise!
Please just make sure your child knows some English before starting daycare. A girl I work with sent her child to daycare not knowing ANY English. She's not doing well at all because the teachers can't tell what the child is saying or tell what she needs.
There's no chance our child won't learn English...it's the only language my husband knows, so obviously he'll be speaking English to our child all the time.
We don’t have any kids yet, but we are definitely planning on trying to raise our children bi-lingual.
I speak Korean fluently and I would be so sad for my children not to have the same chance of learning our culture the way that my parents were able to preserve for my younger brother and me.
FI is monolingual, proficient in Spanish, but he’s also getting on Rosetta Stone Korean to become more proficient :)
Our plan is for me to speak Korean with our children and him to speak English. It will also work out that both our moms will be watching our kids… my mom will speak Korean to them while FMIL will speak English. :)
I’ve heard from other 1.5/2 generation couples that it takes a lot of work and dedication for the parents to upkeep the teaching, but if you stick to it, it does work! :)
My husbands third language is english so we hope to have a bilingual kid someday.
His parents spoke their native language at home, then moved out of the US and sent him to an english speaking school for when they moved back, but all the kids around him spoke their countrie's language so he picked that up from friends quicker than english. So for him it was all about heavy immersion.
One of our friends is an Indian couple who's first languages are different from one another. So they switch back and forth between their first languages sometimes speaking one or the other at home. The kid learns english when they go out but right now he's just speaking some fusion of the three (he's not quite two). From people they've talked to it seems that kids are a bit more slow to completely making sense when they talk when they learn more than one language at a time, but since they are little sponges they don't take that much more time.
I have no advice whatsoever, but there is a family at church with 2 very small kids who are bilingual. The 4 year old is in my sunday school class and can speak English & German fluently. I believe they speak German at home, but include enough English so they know that as well. He's a very bright little boy and doesn't seem to be confused by switching between languages. I think the key is that they consistently speak both languages.
We'll be doing this with our future children. Hubby is Indian (Hindi is native language). We will probably teach the children Hindi and English equally. :)
FI and I will be raising our children to be bilingual. We both speak fluent english and french. He was born in France and my family is from there. English, however, was my first language.
It will be very hard for me not to speak french to our children because we speak about half and half at the house but they say that you are only supposed to speak your mother tounge to your children if you want them to learn the language correctly. They also say that it does not matter what language you speak with your husband as long as you speak only one language to your children.
I will also send my children to the Lycee Francais so they will be proficient in reading and writing. I never know if they want to go back to France one day.
I plan on doing this as well; I will speak to our baby in only Spanish and hopefully my husband will only speak in Turkish. I got the idea from a high school Italian teacher who did the same with her children and they didn't even realize she spoke English until they were over 3 years old. As a bilingual individual myself, I was very glad my parents (who don't speak English) kept up with correcting me and making sure I spoke ,read and wrote Spanish correctly as so many individuals now don't have that level of fluency. Even as an adult I find my vocabulary limited if I don't speak it as often as I used to. It is worth the work to get them acquanted now, and studies have shown the best time to introduce children to new languages is before the age of 7 (if I am not mistaken, it may be earlier). :)
This isn't an option for us because we only speak English - but I love the idea!
I remember in high school my friends had a 3 or 4 year old brother. At basketball games he turned to his dad and spoke in Spanish, then would talk to us in English. It was amazing to me that he could change so fast and 'knew' what language to speak to who!
We also will one day have bilingual children. My FI's native language is Swedish and mine is English. We plan on doing what has been mentioned and I think every night from around a year he will read in Swedish to the children to they not only hear it but can see it written. My Swedish is about ten words so I also feel that having the children learn will further along my learning. I will also have our children take a third language in school. My FI is also proficient in Norwegian, Danish, and German and would love for our children to be the same but maybe in different languages.
wow, I'm so jealous of all of you fluent speakers! I'm more proficient than hubby at foreign languages, but I am not fluent by any means. I took spanish 4 in college, but that was years ago, so now I'm nervous that I would confuse the poor kiddo.
I do research on language learning and everything I've read and researched suggests that a child can only be raised bi-(multi-)lingual if he/she is immersed in an environment where people are native speakers of the languages in question.
As the OP is not a native speaker of French, and therefore does not have native-like competence in French, her child will not really be bilingual. She might end up teaching her child things that would be judged incorrect by native speakers of French, and most likely, the child will grow up to speak a creole form of French.
If you want to raise a child bilingually you need to make sure they find themselves around native speakers of the second language (e.g. at school, with nannies, in a different country, etc.).
Edit: Sorry if this sounds a bit harsh. I'm just trying to help. 
@Shaunna That totally makes sense to me. Since my Hindi is so bad, I will leave it to the hubby to speak proper Hindi to our future children because I don't want to butcher the pronunciation while they are learning.
@Shaunna- I totally agree! I speak french fluently inside and out but it was not my first language. FI will be speaking to our kids in French and I will speak to them in English. Which will be very hard for me but it is the only way to have completely bilingual children.
We're doing English and Spanish. Kids brains are remarkably pliable, and they quickly learn which words go with which language.
I have cousins who occasionally substituted a word when they couldn't come up with the word in English, but they always seemed to know which language to speak to which people.
I work as a teacher in a dual-language (Spanish/English) early childhood education program. Our students are 1-5 years old and mostly come from Spanish speaking homes. We have two teachers who are native English speakers and two who are native Spanish speakers. It's amazing how quickly the kids learn who to speak English to and who to speak Spanish to. They absorb everything so quickly and I am constantly amazed by the progress they make in both languages. I've studied bilingual education and as greenleafmountain said, I think it's important to keep the languages separated. Although I do speak Spanish, I almost never speak to the kids in Spanish unless absolutely necessary because I am one of the two native English speakers.
My mom grew up speaking both languages but lost her Spanish over time so I had to learn Spanish in school. It's definitely something she regrets.
Teaching a child two languages can definitely be done, but it takes a lot of work and intentionality. Good luck!
@Shaunna Thanks for your input (honestly!), as this is something I'm worried about too.
There are native speakers in our French language meetup group, so I'm hoping that this exposure will help compensate where my French is lacking. I also plan to use lots of resources like storybooks and CD's where I know the written and spoken words are grammatically correct. I'm very confident in my pronounciation so I'm not worried about that, and I am able to easily comprehend things written by native speakers (I subscribe to some French blogs and understand about 97% of what they say) so hopefully I am fluent enough to teach things that are correct. I will be especially careful though of teaching things that I'm not sure about, since you bring up a good point.
I have read that babies are born with the capacity to learn any language, and that the brain gradually cuts off pathways to aquire new sound patterns as the child ages. I hope that by exposing my child to the sound patterns of French, they will be better able to learn it later at school. Do you have any knowledge about this?
I really hope it works!
Can I ask why if French is not one of your native languages?
I would honestly hold off until the baby is 2 or 3.
Yes, kids can pick it up really fast. But I have to say with a lot of the kids in my family speech is always a problem because of the different languages.
This is a case of extreme but with my nieces and nephews.
They have Cantonese which the parents speak that to them, my mom speaks fujianese, then the other grandmother speaks another dialect. So they are now exposed to three languages. Once preschool hit there was English. And you find that once that hit English does become their dominant language with some of the other languages speckled in. My niece and nephew (now 7) speak primarily English, can speak Cantonese and understand all the other languages. But it definitely came with it's price.
My niece went through a good 2 years of speech therapy class. My nephew was not that extreme but there were definite speech problems.
I would say unless the baby had to be bilingual from day one I would avoid it till their speech is more developed.
And yes, I do plan on teaching our kids Cantonese because they have to communicate with my mom! :)
Our plan is to raise our children bilingual. I am a native English speaker and FI is a native German speaker. Fi didn't learn English until moving to the States right before high school despite the fact that his father is American. Most people can't even tell that English is his second language though.
Intially, FI wasn't interested, but after a trip to Germany he changed his mind. My uncle (an America) married a German woman and they have three children (ages 6,4, and 2). All three of them are spoken to in German by their mother and English by their father and their fluency and understanding of both languages is quite remarkable. There are times when they combine the languages, but they are aware when there are English-speaking only guests over and have the ability to communicate with very little trouble.
It's cliche to say, but kids really are like sponges. They can handle a lot more than people think.
I have read that babies are born with the capacity to learn any language, and that the brain gradually cuts off pathways to aquire new sound patterns as the child ages.
Yes, this is basically true. The consensus in the literature, though, is that no matter how fluent you might think you are in a language there are finer grammatical points that can only be judged by native speakers. I won't insist on this point, though, as I don't know exactly how proficient you are.
@Gerbera:
Some of what you say has been demonstrated empirically, i.e., yes, bilingual children tend to be slower at acquiring the languages, might mix things up, etc (understandable since they've got more to absorb). However, it has been shown that they do catch up eventually, and actually are much better at picking up additional languages as they grow up.
Research indicates that children's speech/language abilities aren't impacted by learning multiple languages... so the kids mentioned above may have had speech/language delays regardless of the languages spoken at home.
I hope YOU don't think I'm saying that if you raised your child to speak two languages they will have speech problems. Not the case at all. I'm just saying my nieces and nephews are the extreme and from their Speech Therapist's (a professional who is educated in that) opinion some of the speech problems came from the exposure to so many different languages.
My SIL's niece from her sister was exposed to different languages as well and she had no speech problems. In fact that girl is one of the smartest girls in her class every single time.
"Research" is one thing. Real life, how a individual kid reacts to a situation is a completely different story. Just because "research" from interviewing/observing X kids gives you Y results doesn't mean that is the case for every single child out there.
Completely agree. After two or so years of speech therapy my niece is doing great now. Completely understands the dialect the maternal grandma speaks and the dialect paternal grandmother speaks. And speaks English just fine as well. :)
My niece is being raised bilingual - English and Russian (my SIL is Russian). Its funny for a while it was mainly my SIL talking in Russian to her and my BIL talking in English. But when my BIL would say something in Russian to her, shed say "No Daddy, (says the word in English)!" and when SIL spoke in English shed say "no mommy, (says the word in Russian). It was great that she was able to distinguish the difference and its so cool seeing my 3 1/2 year old neice fluent in Russian and English!
My niece is being raised bilingual. My BIL speaks spanish to her exclusively and my sister speaks english to her. Its working well, but BIL can ONLY speak spanish to her, no slip ups!
I wasn't raised bilingual but my family moved to our city because there are 3 public immersion schools here; french spanish and japanese. I stated in 3rd grade and my younger siblings started (all at french immersion) at the kindergarden level. I cannot stress enough how amazing immersion language school is and I am so gratefull to my parents for sending me to immersion school. Neither of them speak french really despite taking it in HS (except orering drinks my dad can order beer in like 4 languages lol) and I consider myself fluent!
I was raised in a bilingual home, but all I have to go on is my own experience. My mom is French and moved here 2 years before she had me. She spoke only French with me, and my dad would speak English. My brother came along 6 years later, and she did the same with him, but he hated having to speak another language, so he hardly spoke French back, and now he can barely speak any. I can still speak it fluently, though it's a lot harder now that I don' t have anyone to speak it with regularly anymore. I think the immersion was great for not just learning the language, but also everything that comes with a language and culture - all of the nuances, the sayings and lingo, etc. You don't learn that stuff in class ;) I feel very fortunate to have had a mom who tried so hard to pass on her culture, and believe me, it was a lot of work for her to do that. You have to be really committed. And in response to someone suggesting waiting until the child is 2 or 3, I disagree. Start right away - my mom even spoke to me while I was still in her womb to get me used to it (a little extreme!), and my first words were in French, so I guess it worked!
I think what you said is absolutely right.
Forgot to mention that I'll be raising my kids bilingual too, but only because FI and I actually have different mother-tongues.
I agree that starting early is the best thing to do. My parents only speak Spanish so they had no choice but to raise me speaking Spanish. My cousin and I were talking about this, how everyone says that we are lucky to speak two languages, but the reality of it is that neither of us ever remember learning that other language, so it is an entirely different experience than waiting until there is a cognitive element to having someone speak the language to you. Spanish was my first language and my mother assumed I was getting enough English watching Sesame Street and in preschool, which happened to be correct. Trying to learn another language now bears no comparison to a time when your brain is a sponge for information.
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My husband and I want to teach our baby both English (our native language) and French (husband knows none; I studied in school and lived in France - I was once fluent but am now very rusty). Is anyone else raising a bilingual baby? Can anyone recommend any good resources?
My plan for now is to try to speak French exclusively to the baby, and also get children's books in French and take the baby along to a French language meetup that meets weekly in my city. Any other suggestions?