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?
I have a little bit of experience in this. Brazilian living in Quebec. So, my friends almost always spoke in Portuguese with their children, school and TV were in French. After some time, school starts also to teach English and they chose the language of the TV. Now the kids are almost always speaking in English, although the are fluent in Portuguese and, of course, French.
Now, my wife and I hated the TV in French, so we kept it in English. So, my kids had to deal with three languages from the start. They mixed everything up and we screwed up by saying words in all three languages. We speak mainly Portuguese but we would use words that they learned in other languages in those languages instead of in Portuguese. In the end, my kids mix all three languages in a single sentence, which is weird as hell. They’re slowly separating the languages and we too. Now, every sentence we speak is in a single language. Their friends help in a way, because they also speak French in class but English outside (and Quebec’s government hates that).
So, if both of you are Portuguese speakers, I’d only speak Portuguese with them and let the TV and school teach English. They’ll know how to keep things separated.
Their friends help in a way, because they also speak French in class but English outside (and Quebec’s government hates that).
I’m not familiar with how the Quebec government works so that sentence made me curious. Why does the govt. hate that?
They try everything so people keep speaking in French. They force kids to go to French schools and reduced the places in English schools. They’ve had teachers and monitors forcing kids to speak in French even during recess. Of course it doesn’t work and kids will speak in whatever language they want, mainly English.
It’s interesting to hear the steps taken to achieve their goals, but I was more curious about why those are their goals in the first place. Why does the govt. want to force a language on the people when they obviously prefer a different language?
Not a parent, but I was raised bilingually in English and German, while growing up in Germany.
My Dad (almost) always speaks English with me, and my Mom (almost) always speaks German with me, even to this day at age 31. This approach worked well for us and I’m fluent in both languages, but I can imagine an approach where both parents speak both languages could work as well.
What also really helped me was to consume a lot of media in English, so maybe you could encourage your child to do that as well.
I wasn’t raised bilingual but consuming Portuguese media helped me learn really quickly (just over a year to be at a comfortable conversational level).
Is there a native Portuguese speaker in the child’s life? Otherwise it’s a little dicey, because they’ll inherit your errors, but if you’re really careful about it and flood them with Portuguese language input from native speakers in the form of songs and audiobooks that you can read along with in person, you can still give them a good linguistic foundation.
My parents don’t speak English, but I learned it as a kid by watching a lot of Cartoon Network. All the cartoons were in English, no subtitles or dub or anything. Somehow I assimilated the language without any external aid, and then learned the rest when we first got the internet and I started communicating with others via games.
So, if I had to teach a kid English, I’d just expose them to as much English as possible with plenty of context and encourage them to express themselves in English when they can. This is also a popular method how adults can learn languages, called tprs
Same. Grew up watching Cartoon Network, HBO and the Discovery Channel with no subs (or dubs, they are not a thing in RO). Then there was music (lyrics) and later on video games and the Internet. It helped not having any OS or software available in my native language. Even to this day I use my phone and computer in English.
While I did have English classes at school (6th to 12th), the level was rather basic… I also took French for 10 years, and I can barely speak it. Otoh, I didn’t take one Italian class, but I can speak some, and understand almost everything. Again, this is because we had a bunch of Italian TV channels in the early 90s.
We speak Irish to the kids as much as possible, essentially all the time. Them learning English is a given, a force like gravity.
We try to get them to read Irish books, watch Irish cartoons, but that can be a struggle with the temptation of English-language ones. Children have their own strong preferences about those things.
Former child in a bilingual household. The time that your child spends outside of your home has by far the biggest influence on language fluency. You can have your child speak a language at home, and they would be able to understand it and speak it, but it would be limited - likely conversationally fluent, but not natively fluent.
If you can find a community for that language and culture that you visit every once a week, it will help reinforce that language. There might be language schools run by people from that culture - it’ll be an easy way to get in touch with other people from that same culture
