Babble

Check out Concordia Language Villages.  They're summer language camps in Northern Minnesota that are supported by Concordia University in Moorhead, MN.  They have a Finnish Camp and should have a program available for children.  My husband is German and I'm fluent in German (partly because I went to the German Language Camp in High School).  We're going to start trying to have kids soon, so we've talked about how to deal with raising children to be bilingual.  These camps are great to have kids be immersed in the language with other kids.

katja - Terve!  I'm half-Finnish too!  My mom is from Finland.  Finnish was actually my first language.  I think there were two factors that allowed me to actually learn Finnish even though I was born and raised in the United States:

1 - We had Finnish nannies for the first few years of my life

2 - We spent every summer in Finland until I was a teenager

When I was a teenager I stopped speaking Finnish even in Finland because I was self-conscious.  But I still understand it quite well and I'm sure if I spent a few months in Finland my recall would come back and I'd be able to speak it again.

 But I think if you don't have some type of immersion, either through a caregiver or by travelling, it's hard to teach a kid a second language all by yourself.

My sister came to an English-speaking country when she was 2 years old. At home we spoke to her in our first language, outside she heard lots of English. She speaks both now (at six) and can read and write, too. Not perfectly, but she learns.

You're welcome, smashedpea (and sorry there wasn't much new for you there). 

With reading and writing you can start teaching the alphabet from a very young age (some people I know even started at birth). But learning the alphabet has to be fun and playful to be effective, and one early-learning system developed recently that's eactly that is the Letterland series of books, animated DVDs and music CDs.

The Letterland system imprints letter shapes mnemonically by having a character for each letter and superimposing the letter over that character. K, for example, is the character "Kicking King". He's shaped like a K, and the letter K is outlined and clearly visible. In the book, he can be seen kicking a ball around and he's surrounded by a whole bunch of things that start with the letter K. 

Eventually, as you read the book with the child and connect "Kicking King" with the letter K for her ("Kicking King is K!"), she becomes able to connect the character's appearance, to the character's name and then finally, to the letter itself. And hopefully, if you emphasise the sound of the character's name and of the things that start with K, she will be able to associate the shape of the letter to the sound it makes (which is the first step in reading).

The Letterland DVDs are great, and the music fun - it's an enjoyable but rigorous learning system. The version I have is British English (which is fine for me) but they probably have a North American version as well. You can get it at Amazon etc.

Good luck with it!

Hei K1!

 

Momeeeeee:

which some studies have shown to be a lag in receptive language development at first.

i'd be curious to know what's "normal" for this lag you mentioned. are there any books you'd recommend about this?

my son is 27 months, and is just barely starting repeat after us, and make up two word sentences.. i wonder sometimes if he's just "the quiet type".. or if this is normal. i speak only english to him and his dad only french. he seems to be getting both languages (somewhat) equally.. and lots of times the right words to the right person. i am happy with his progress, but i feel like he is behind his peers for language.

anyone want to share their thoughts or experiences on this?
 

Love this subject. I'm one of those high school Spanish adults who never achieved anything close to fluency, but I wish I had. So am living vicariously through my 4 year old son. He started daycare at 3-months with several Spanish speaking caregivers. He was an early talker and picked up both Spanish and English quite well. At age 2 we moved him to a formal bi-lingual program where all the teachers are native Spanish speakers and about 60% of the kids are too. They speak mostly Spanish to him all day, though they do work on teaching the Spanish kids English too, so it's not 100% immersion but pretty close. We find that he resists speaking Spanish to us at home, because he recognizes that it's not "our" language. And as I put it "doesn't do parlor tricks" in that he refuses to show off his skills. However, according to the teachers and our Spanish speaking friends, his vocabulary, pronunciation and grasp of the language are all quite good. All the reading I've done supports the other comments that it's really tough to teach your kid a second language if you're not native to it. I think that my high school knowledge is useful in that I can recognize and support the things he does say with me - we look up words we can't remember in the Spanish/English dictionary, and I can help him with some fundamentals of grammer (boy words vs girl words, etc) but the meat of the learning will come from the native speakers that he spends 8 hours a day with. I think that pushing too hard with books and videos can be counter productive, although it's great to have them around - as long as they're not pushed too hard. We have other friends I find really interesting, where the Norwegian dad speaks his language almost exclusively with their daughter and the Chinese mom speaks hers almost exclusively to their daughter. She picks up English from daycare, friends, and I'm sure with help from her parents who speak English to each other. She has also been to visit both their native countries. Love the fact that their 4 year old has a firm grasp already of three such very different languages. Good luck!

i think you are doing exactly the right thing..   i've read quite a lot of articles/book snippets on the subject, and they all stress the CONSISTENCY theme.  my husband and i have 3 kids, aged 4, 2 and 3 mos..  my husband ONLY speaks italian to them, and i ONLY speak english to them.  (my husband and i speak english to each other, with occasional EASY italian thrown in for my benefit!).  the 4 year old is very aware of the differences between the two languages, and knows very well that certain words are "papas" and certain words are "mamas."  for example, if i say to my son "io ti amo".. he corrects me and says, "no mama, papa says that.  mama says I LOVE YOU."  it's really amazing.   if my son says "thank you" to my husband, my husband does a quick "grazie" to him as a gentle correction, and my son repeats it.  don't get me wrong, we aren't mega-strict or anything, but we do try to each speak our own language consistently with them.  and now the 2 year old is getting it too.

we really like the MUZZY series of DVDs.  it is a great learning tool, and it actually has helped me learn quite a bit of italian, too.  it comes in quite a few of the more popular foreign languages.  it is produced by the BBC.   www.early-advantage.com if you are interested in checking it out.  it has allowed me a few peaceful showers over the years, too.

good luck!

my son is 4, and my husband speaks italian and i speak english to him.  we had the same experience that you are having.  i was getting a little worried at 2 years old, because family started commenting on how he didn't say much.  well, as his mom, i felt it was because he was processing 2 languages all the time, and it was just taking him a little extra time to get going.    well, lo and behold, within 6 months, his language blossomed like you wouldn't believe.  now, a few months before his 4th b-day, he speaks each of the languages with the corresponding parents and we can't get him to shut up!  :)  i'm sure your son will likely do the same, unless you have a gut feeling that there is something more serious going on. 

best wishes

My son is 16 months old and I am trying to teach him korean but I do speak to him in english as well. However I don't speak to him exclusively in one language all the time. After reading these posts I am reconsidering (I do repeat in both english and korean and it does drive me nuts!). But I do read to him in korean, although I am not fluent korean speaker...That said I am improving thanks to having to read with him. Oh and the other wrinkle to this is that we are taking Mandarin mommy and me classes. At this point I'm just hoping he's hearing different sounds and keeping those languages pathways open in his brain.

 Don't forget that some kids are just going to be naturally better at picking up language(s).  Even kids raised in the exact same circumstances can exhibit wildly different results-- ie, I am completely fluent in Japanese, my sister is not.  My friend  speaks English, Norwegian, and Japanese to her kids-- one of her daughters manages all three without any trouble, but her other daughter is only really fluent in English.  (it will be interesting though to see if down the road it will turn out that the Norwegian and Japanese are 'in there somewhere'.)  Some kids may need strict consistency, as you say above, while others can be thrown into any kind of lingual mess and somehow come out speaking and differentiating just fine.  The most important thing seems to be deep competency in one language; at my international school, it was the kids who ended up half-assed in two languages, and not native at either, that seemed to really be getting the short end of the stick.  This usually happened when their parents pushed hard for them to learn second and third languages and neglected their first, and mostly was an issue if the primary and secondary education was in the second or third language.  

 

 Very interesting topic!  I came across this forum searching for bilingual education materials.  I'm fluently bilingual in American English and Norwegian (bokmål), and know a bit of German as well.  My boyfriend and I will teach our children (when we have them) both languages.

 I also teach Norwegian to adults and to children at the local Sons of Norway lodge.  We are starting a Norwegian-immersion barnehage (preschool) Saturday mornings.  Some of the children are mono-lingual English and some are bilingual English/Norwegian.

 The way I learned Norwegian was through my dad speaking Norwegian-only on Mondays.  Sometimes on other days and at other times (especially holidays), but mostly on Mondays.

Peter:

BrooklynMama:

We would love our son to be bilingual, but neither one of us is competent enough in another language to make it happen! I

 

That's my problem as well.  I want my sons to speak Spanish, but my high school espanol no es muy bien.  We live in a largely Latino area, so they hear a lot anyway, but I fret about it.  My wife speaks Chinese, so they'll probably learn that along the way. 

Best of luck to everyone in trying to raise bilingual kids, but let me add a small word of advice/caution.  My grandparents immigrated from Germany in 1950 and my dad was raised completely bilingual in English/German.  He is still fluent to this day, but it so scarred him as a child that he didn't teach any of it to me and I had to struggle through three terms of college level german to pick it up.  My point is this, just having a bilingual parent is not enough, you have to really make an effort at it.  My husband (lucky me) is also fluent in German, so he talks to our kids in German and I in English and if we are both involved than we speak German to help both them and me! All I'm saying is, you have a wonderful opportuity to give your kids a head start!  Do everything you can to encourage them!

I'm part Cuban and part Chilean (born in the U.S.) and my daughter's father is Puerto Rican (also born in the U.S.) Although his spanish is atrocious, mine isn't that bad. I never thought that I would speak Spanish to my daughter because I only spoke it when I had to, but it turns out that I do only speak to her in Spanish with few exceptions. It also helps that at the preschool she goes to they speak spanish as well. On ther other hand, me and her father only speak to each other in English. She is now beggining to speak (2 years old) clearly and she is speaking in Spanish. I don't know if she understands English, but I figure (like my own mother did, and it worked) that she will learn the English language in school (pre-K and up). So my suggestions is to only speak to her in the language that you want her to learn now. She'll pick up on English later.

 Also, an attorney that works in my office had their Cuban nanny only speak to their sons (when they were little) in Spanish ONLY. Now these are white American folk that don't speak a lick of Spanish themselves. Well, as it turns out, their youngest which is now totally fluent in Spanish and he swears that that is the reason why.

Hope this helps. Good luck.

My husband and I speak English and we're not from Spanish-speaking families.  But one of our greatest desires is for our children to be bilingual.

From the time our first daughter was conceived we knew that we wanted to teach her Spanish.  So we bought bilingual books, programs, music and shows to expose her to as much Spanish as possible.

Before our later 3 children came along, we had a Spanish-speaking babysitter and enrolled our daughter in a Spanish-immersion program. 

I'm so delighted with how much Spanish all of my children  know and use. (They're 6, 4, 4 and 1.)

I invite you to visit my blog www.spanish-lesson-plans-for-children.blogspot.com.  It chronicles what we've done on our bilingual journey.

All the best on yours.

Jessica