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 Hi, My wife and I have so far adopted the OPOL strategy. Her native language is English, mine is Dutch, which is the majority language since we live in the Netherlands. Our two children have a clear preference for Dutch. They understand English perfectly...
Question Hello, We are Czech-Finnish couple living for 3 years in Finland and we just got our first child. We tried to agree on our family-language-strategy before our son was born, but we couldn´t agree on one. What was sure was, that each one of us wants to speak to...
Question My wife and I are having a baby, we are truly excited but we are scared about the language in how to educate our child. We are of different nationalities, Portuguese and Russian, we live in Germany (since one year) and our common language is English (our...
Which strategy should you use to raise your bilingual child? Ask the question and you can be forgiven for getting all confused with the different viewpoints you are offered both by experts and other parents. Today I will take a closer look at the best-known of the...
Question We live in Israel, and I am from Mexico, my husband speaks only Hebrew with our 3-year-old boy, and I speak only Spanish, from my side he does not hear a Hebrew word. We were just in Mexico and his Spanish is now till the moon - I am so glad that he developed...
Question We want our son to be at least bilingual Spanish/English and hopefully have a good command of French too. I look after my son full time since my wife works during the day. So I am desperately trying to work out the best way to approach making sure our son...
Question I have a question about OPOL (one person, one language). We tried this method with my eldest, who is now 4, but the problem we had from day one, that isn’t factored into this method, is grandparents – my Japanese husband’s parents live next door and see my...