Ask HN: How do/would you teach a second language to your child? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do/would you teach a second language to your child?

3 pointscodegeek5 comments

For those of us who speak more than one language, how do you handle this scenario ? For example, my daughter was born in the US. She is going to be a "native" English speaker. I am not, neither is my wife. We both speak a different native language even though we have been americans for a while. I would want my daughter to at least speak some of it and be able to converse with her grandparents. How do parents handle this ? I don't want to force anything on my kids.

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I’m from Argentina, my daughter speaks English very well, and I have many friends with kids living in USA/Canada.

Do you and your wife speak the same language? You and your wife should talk to your daughter in your own language(s). Your daughter will be a little confused, but after a while she will understand.

Don’t worry, she will survive to the mix of languages. The main examples is Catalonia in Spain. Almost 100% of the people speak Catalan and Spanish for historical and political reasons. The kids grow up without problems, speaking both languages.

Your daughter will be a native English speaker. (The native language is the language they use in kindergarten.) She will use the English sounds to speak in your language and the pronunciation will never be perfect, but enough to talk.

Don’t worry too much. Just speak naturally and your daughter will learn.

Get some movies with English and your language(s) audio and subtitles. Play the wathc the movie in the different language. (With small children, the problem is not to repeat the movie, but to repeat it only a few times.) My daughter loved to see the movie mixing the audio and subtitles in different languages. (I hope you don’t have problems with the DVD zones.)

Books are also good. I try to buy her the books in the original language when it’s available and she can understand it, in spite she sometimes don’t know a word and has to use Google to translate it.

Also, start with comics. The story is simple, the text is short, and she will get a lot of information from the sorrounding drawings.

I have friends in a similar situation: living in France and both speaking a perfect French, but the father is a native German speaker. His main technique, during the first 3 years of his son, was to talk to him in French, but immediately repeat the same thing in German, and making clear that it was just the same thing in another language. Now his son is 8, and truly bilingual.

I've always been of the opinion that I would eventually have children. I've also always believed, since age 25 or so, that raising children to be bilingual would be beneficial, pretty much regardless of the languages involved.

Learning earlier is easier, and will be helpful for the future.

Happily I married a Finnish woman, and we've agreed we'll use both languages all the time. (Helpfully I'm also learning Finnish at the moment).

The (local) people I've seen do things seem to either repeat words in both languages, or speak solely in English one day, and "foreign" the next day.

I'm not sure which is best, but I'm looking forward to finding out :)

Speak to your children in your native language and English to each other since you don't share a mutual language. It hasn't prevented my children from learning. Alternatively exposure to foreign shows in your native language helps.

One co-worker sent the kids to a weekend Chinese school.

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