Comments on: Ask an Expert: Is it Too Early to Teach Our Son to Learn 3 Languages?

By: BethO

BethO — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 20:00:04 +0000

Elisa, when I first moved to Houston and started getting to know people, I was surprised by how many adults I met who told me they’d arrived here as children speaking no English beforehand and yet they had no accent. Plus, it became very obvious to me there was no difference in the English skills, between those whose parents had continued speaking their native language at home, and those whose parents switched to English-only. This is just one person’s observation but I think the experts’ information bears this out too. Children pick up the language and accent of whomever they spend a lot of time talking with. As soon as they’re old enough for school, that’s where they’ll be all day. I predict your child will have an accent for about five minutes.

By: Elisa_Croatia

Elisa_Croatia — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 18:37:45 +0000

It’s always interesting to read about other parents teaching their children more than one language. At the moment, I speak spanish to our 2 year old, Hubby speaks Croatian (we are living in Croatia) so she also gets the language from grandparents and great-grandparents. She picks up some english from my interaction with hubby, but he thinks it’s time to also teach her more English. I’m not as concerned since she will be attending school in the states.But I do wonder is she will have an accent?

Good questions and great advice.

Good luck.

By: soultravelers3

soultravelers3 — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 18:21:40 +0000

Great question and excellent answer! We are monolinguals raising a very fluent trilingual ( English, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish) , so know how hard it can be, but it CAN be done. The work does not finish in babyhood either as many children lose their languages ( even native tongues) as quickly as they pick them up.

I think you are right that there are some advantages of learning from birth or as early as possible. We’ve found that one does not have to be perfectly fluent to give a language to a baby. My husband is not fluent in Spanish and he has an accent, yet he was instrumental in helping our child be fluent in Spanish from birth.

We did supplement other things ( native speaking babysitters, went to play groups with all native Spanish speakers, watched and listened to Spanish videos and music daily, read books in Spanish starting inutero etc) but we had a baby sitter who was a teacher in Columbia who ran their bilingual program. She was so amazed at how perfect our child’s Spanish was ( especially compared to her father who had poor, bad accent Spanish) that she talked her sister in Columbia in doing the same method with her baby. ( She had been afraid to do it because of her non-perfect English).

So you could consider always talking to your child in English ( and making sure the child ALWAYS answers you back in English which is key) and let your husband always communicate with the child in Polish.

If you supplement the English in other ways, you will be quite pleased and surprised by the results.

Just an idea based on our experiences. Good luck!

By: Jon

Jon — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 14:12:51 +0000

What an amazingly well written and thoughtful answer to a difficult question – lots of love, wisdom and common sense nicely mixed together. Thank you Barbara!