"Bilingual" children

[carine]

Monkey, how old is your child? My son is 4, we are a French-English bilingual family (I'm French, hubby English). I'd be happy to arrange play dates though might be hard to insist kids speak exclusively in French... My son refused to speak English until he hung out with his exclusively English-speaking cousins when it all came out - had clearly been there all along. PM me if you'd like kids to meet!

[veryseriousgirl]

Monkey, you definitely haven't left it too late. Biologically, our brains can learn a language as a native speaker until around the time we hit puberty (when the brain assumes we've learned any languages we need to know and then prunes out the native language learning facilities - you can still learn a language later, you will just never "get" it like a native). I also used to teach French at an immersion school in the US - our key was just to keep speaking French ourselves, try to get the kids to respond in French, but just know that they were absorbing the language little by little as we kept speaking at them over and over and over again! :) I'm sure that you will do a great job getting your little one to speak French!

[cheyanne]

I have two children that are fluent in Swedish...and my suggestion would be not to give up when they don't want to or seem to loose interest.

Mine used to say that they don't want to speak swedish as none of their friends do, but now at 8 and 12, I do believe that I did the right thing not to give up, I have a few friends that has given up and now their children knows none or very little Swedish. But I do tend to not speak Swedish around non-swedish people as its a little inconsiderate :-))

Songs and DVD's helps as well.

And apparently children that grows up being bilingual find it easier learning more languages later in life.

[magkath]

This is a great post!

I was wondcring if anybody knows how the triligual situation can be handled though?

My husband's Japanese and I'm Polish. We communicate in English, but I really want our kid (due in Feb) to speak all three languages.

Obviously one parent, one language approach will work for as long as there is no need for all 3 of us to talk together.

What then?

Any tips on this front?

[sandy_rose]

I grew up trilingual, in Sweden with Finnish mum and Italian dad. We spoke Swedish at home and my mum sometimes spoke Finnish to me, we mainly spoke the other languages on holiday in that country. It did help that my mum was a teacher so we had very long holidays! Apparently by the age if 4 I was fluent in all three languages and would translate between my grandparents whenever they all came to stay at the same time etc. I think the most important thing was having family and friends my age, speaking the other language was the one thing that motivated me to actually speak that language too. I notice my daughter understands every Swedish word I say but she prefers to answer in English at the moment, though she speaks Swedish with my parents as she knows they don't understand English.

It's not confusing for children to have lots of different languages at home. If anything it'll be very easy for them to learn other languages at school. German came very easily to me for example as the grammas is similar to Italian but totally different to Swedish.