multilingual children

[szabgab]

Hmm, I guess I am reading too much about motherhood and stuff as I started to remember that once I was very interested in the topic of multilingual children. I subscribed to a mailing list where people discussed difficulties and how they manage it. I even bought a book or two about the subject.

I think this helped a lot and my son now has both a Hebrew mother-tongue and a partial Hungarian father-tongue, so to speak. Unfortunately my daughter quite refuses to speak in Hungarian. She does not even want me to tell her stories in Hungarian.

Anyway I searched for multilingual and surprisingly only found one other person listing it as an interest.

Comments

[yvi]

I know that pne is bringing up his daughter English-German.

[cesy]

Out of curiosity, would you call yourself bilingual or fluent in English or something else?

[yvi]

I call myself fluent in English, because I only started learning at 11. But I regularly speak, think and sometimes even dream in English, so on a day-to-day basis I suppose it isn't a big difference :)

[cesy]

Several of my cousins are to some extent multilingual, due to where they've lived. For English people living abroad, the kids tend to grow up bilingual just because they'll speak one language at school and another at home. One family has now moved back to the UK, and the kids are still very good at languages, though nowhere near multilingual.

What ages did they start learning the other languages, and how much did they speak them? I would guess that makes a huge difference.

start at 0

[szabgab]

I started to talk to them Hungarian when they were born, actually I think even before that.

My son was more lucky in that we spent almost a year in Hungary after he was born so even his first words were in Hungarian. Then we moved back to Israel and when my daughter was born she heard a lot less Hungarian as the environment was not there and even I could spend less time with her than with my son.

[chichiri]

Hi, nice to meet you.

I think it's a very useful skill to have your children grow up multilingual if they are interested. I have a friend who grew up multilingual in Japanese and English (she and her family are all Japanese, but she was raised in the United States) and now she is a professional Japanese to English translator. She said her parents used to make her sister and her give them a quarter any time they spoke English in the house and that's why she is multilingual now.

I don't have any children yet, but eventually I'd like to try to raise my children to be multilingual. :)

one parent one language

[szabgab]

Hi, nice to meet you too.

It certainly have advantages for the children to grow up with more than one languge but it can also be difficult. In our case I am the only one who can constantly communicate with the kids in the other language which makes things complicated. Sometimes to the point of lack of understanding in the family. This brought me to the point that many times I prefer to speak in the majority language to avoid confusion.

How do you plan to raise children in multilingual environment? Are you living in a country with a different language than your mother-tongue?

Re: one parent one language

[chichiri]

No, but there is an elementary school in the area that does "total immersion" in another language. The choices are Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese. We're considering trying to enroll our children in this school once we have children.

Re: one parent one language

[szabgab]

I think the big question is how to emotionally motivate the kid to ue the other language. My kids constatntly switch to Hungarian when they want to please me.
When they "want something from me".

And of course there is grandma and some friends in Hungary.