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?
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).
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.
Our little one will be learning Irish as a third language at school.
I'm bilingual.
They just sent me to an English daycare and spoke French with me at home.
Then I could do the rest on my own.
We’ve got a similar long term plan. We will slowly build up the amount of Portuguese content.
So we have 3 languages in the family, native languages for me and wife + English as common language. It's a huge mess and at almost 4yo she's mixing up languages and a little bit slow on learning to speak in general, but we've been told that's just how it goes
Linguist here. Yes that's just how it goes. It'll come out alright in the end.
i love hearing about this kinda thing, im sure your kid will be glad to have grown up this way once she's got the hang of it :)
French and English in school, Mandarin course on Saturday. Cantonese with parents,
At least that was my upbringing
I moved to the Netherlands when my boy was 8yo. At that time he was fluent and capable to read and write in Portuguese. Now, two years later he can also do the same in Dutch, but the challenge now is that he is forgetting some words or some meanings in his mother tongue. I ask to everyone coming from Brazil to bring books for him, which helps a lot (he loves to read). Besides of that, it's super hard for me to follow up him with his homework.
I was raised bilingual, and speaking from my own experiences I'd say that it's a good idea to consider the following questions if you want to maximize the child's ability in either language:
- Is there a parent who the child sees more or less often than the other? What will one do in case one parent dies, or in case the child has a language disorder, or there is otherwise some sort of unexpected problem that could impact the child's language development?
- What are the language dynamics at play in the family and in the local area? What will the child associate with each of the two languages? Can the child have all its needs met in the non-dominant language? Does the child have access to a broader community of speakers, and in what way?
I'm not sure if it's a good idea to share my own story because it gets pretty melodramatic at points, but yeah, language skills need to be built and maintained over the course of one's entire life, so you need to be able to adapt to changing circumstances. But as a whole I think that what you're planning for your own kid sounds like it will work well, or at least decently well — the only way to know for sure is to get a time machine and go forwards 20 years, and until then I think it's best to have faith in your competence as a parent. There's no-one who knows a family better than itself.
And beyond that, one should also ask oneself... Well, what types of language skills does one want to see in one's child, and what happens if the child ultimately does not reach the goals one has set? I'd say that I have sort of a nuanced or over-complicated relationship to so-called "bad grammar" because of my position.
