Why do parents need a strategy to make sure the children grow up speaking the family languages? After all, kids grow up learning more than one language all over the world all the time. This is of course true. If the circumstances are right, children will naturally grow up learning the languages they hear around them. The trick is knowing what the right circumstances are and being able to intervene if it looks like there is not enough input in a language or a majority language is about to take over. A child should want and need to speak a language, and there should be plenty of opportunities to use it. Parents should feel confident in their ability to pass on their language and believe that it is possible to successfully raise children to speak more than one language.
Question Dear Rita, I'm raising two children in the United States where they will learn English naturally from their surroundings but I speak to them in Greek about 90-95% of the time and my husband also speaks to them in Greek but more of a mix of the two languages....
Question Dear Rita, Thank you for your wealth of knowledge and great posts! So far bilingual has been easy, since both my husband and I are German and we live in Texas. We both speak our native German with our almost 2-year-old daughter and with each other. She learnt...
Question Hello! My name is Lucia. My American husband and I live in Gijon, a little city in the north of Spain. Right now we are pregnant and we starting thinking which is the best plan to raise our baby bilingually. We have a doubt between two ideas. One, I...
Question Dear Coaches, Thank you for such an amazing informative website which has helped me better understand the world of learning more than one language that I grew up in and that I have taught in. During the past fifteen years I have taught young four-five...
Question Dear Family Language Coaches, Thanks for this service, which has been super helpful to us. Our kids are effectively trilingual – fluent in French, English and Japanese. Us parents are bilingual. One of us speaks to the kids in about 50% French, 50% English,...
Question Hi, I'm currently pregnant but have started questioning so many things about my kids already. Me and my husband both are from India settled in US. My parents do not understand English and can speak only in native language. I would like my kids to learn and...
Question Hi, I just found this website while I was looking for an answer to my question on how to introduce a third language to our 18 month-old daughter, who has just started talking in the two languages that her father and I speak to her. Your website looks very...
Question Hi I am after some advice. We as a family are bilingual. I am British, my husband is Brazilian and we live in Finland. My 4-year-old daughter has never had a speech delay, if not amazingly speaking earlier than the normal. It’s like she was born to be good...
Question Hello, I wonder about minority language (mL) between parents combined with one parent, one language (OPOL), and the benefits of having spoken/understood several languages during childhood without making it to even receptive bilingualism. We are young...
Question Hi, I currently live and work in China. I am from Australia and English is my mother tongue. My wife is Chinese. We have a 19-month-old son, Daniel. When it came to deciding which approach to choose in order to raise Daniel as bilingual, OPOL seemed to be the...