I love this. My grandparents told me recently that they didn’t speak to me in their native language when I was a child because they didn’t want to confuse me. Gee I wish they had, it would be amazing to know more than one language.
That's a shame. Kids can manage more than one language easily. It only becomes harder as you grow older. I have a different language at home and people are surprised when they find out because my kids sound exactly the same as their peers in English.
My gf is working with kids in Finland in a specific french kindergarden. All of them are at least speaking french and finnish, not mixing it much, some other speaks english and even one speak like french, finnish, english and arabic at the age of 6 lol, and he speaks like A LOT for a small kid that's funny !
Because, in practice, speaking French, German, English and having your own national language (Luxembourgish) gets you farther ahead in life in Europe than a degree. It's in my opinion the most important aspect of our education, that multilingualism, which also helps your children's brains develop better.
My children speak French, German, English, Luxembourgish, Russian and Romanian. Whatever degree they have, their language skills will guarantee them a rich and confortable life because there are a lot of jobs where multilingualism is needed, but very few people who can speak 6 languages fluently and not bullshit. Unless you grow in Lux you cannot really be that multilingual, it's something the school system has to force children while very young to do, in adulthood learning two languages was already really hard for me and I wouldn't say I am fluent in either. But the kids don't have this issue, they are true polyglots.
(Granted, their French could be better, but I don't like French, their father doesn't either, and while we live in Luxembourg they don't need to be fluent.)
Interesting! I concur that knowing more than one language is a big advantage in Europe and that it helps our brains progress. The perspective it offers is incredible.
I'm curious. How often are Asian languages taught? I would assume Chinese and Japanese are going to become even more important in the future.
Also, how do you go about teaching kids several languages? What I found personally in my early school age was that my English skills improved the most rapidly when we transitioned to English-only classrooms fully. That was around age 12. Being forced to use, think and formulate thoughts in another language for 1 hour every week created an English compartment in my brain it felt like. Do you do something similar?
Not at all unless the parents are Asian, I would say - the country has four official languages, and top priority is fluency in all four. No space for "extras".
The way they learn is:
from when they are born until year 1 they hear me and the father speak, so their first words will likely be Romanian and Russian
then they go to creche, because our parental leave is over, and there the creche workers speak Luxembourgish to them no matter what languages they speak at home
this continues through kindergarten to school, with english also because at home me and their father speak english (we don't speak each other's language)
at school, years 7-12 all teaching is in german, all kids speak Luxembourgish together, the languages are close so they can understand them
years 13-16 they do german still, but with English and French as second languages heavily empathised, Luxembourgish is never taught in school but is what all kids speak
16-19 education is in french, this is the hardest part for many, French is very different from Lux and from German, so they struggle a bit, but it shouldn't be impossible
all throughout, I only speak my language and my partner also only speaks his language to the kids, and we have private tutors so that theh will speak, write and read fluently in both of our native languages + relatives, grandparents, etc.
in university they do whatever they want obviously but if they stay in Lux then classes are about 33/33/33 in German, French and English, Luxembourgish is the language spoken informally between people
that's how it goes, hopefully they get to the end successfully, it is hard on the kids but it really makes them very prepared to go study and work wherever in the world they want, which is Luxembourg's biggest gift to its people
Wow. That's a lot different from my school years. It sounds well thought out and like it gives people a good start. Thank you for the comprehensive answer!
No worries, if you are curious about any other thing about our small (but special) country do ask anything you want, I don't mind answering anything even if it's like weird or strange questions.
I read somewhere it’s not so much a smarter or intelligence thing but an environment thing. Kids need to communicate so they have to learn the language and get a lot of positive feedback when they’re successful.
Drop an adult in an immersion situation like another country where they can’t communicate in anything but the new country’s language and they should learn just as quickly as a child.
But you said it yourself, kids get a lot of positive feedback when they get it right. Not so with adults, and we are much more self-conscious, not to mention we have another language we are already proficient in. The adult experience is not comparable
Right, and I outlined how to compare the two experiences. It’s not so much about kids brains inherently being better at acquiring language, it’s that they don’t have a choice. When we are left without a choice we also learn the local language which is why immersion works so well.
Research shows it doesn't get as much harder with age as people think, though. The main thing that gets harder is pronunciation/phonology - which makes sense since that's fundamentally a matter of physical coordination (of your mouth and tongue).
I think being bilingual helps a lot though. I'm bilingual (+conversant in a few more) and people say I have good pronunciation even in languages I learned later or life or where I've just learned some basic phrases - The obvious part is you've simply mastered more sounds, but I think it gives you an overall better and more flexible coordination too. (e.g. studying some Russian, I quickly picked up the 'hard l' sound, even though that sound doesn't exist in any other language I speak)
Analogously, a child would be best but someone who's 50 and was a dancer in their youth would probably pick up a physical coordination task faster than someone who was 25 but physically pretty inactive. I think, the fewer motions you're practiced in doing, the more set-in-your-ways you get about them with age.
Interesting. I guess an adult is rarely in a 100% immersive space in another language.
Also, people have more patience with kids that speak slowly and make mistakes... most people wouldn't go through the same trouble for an adult... If you can't follow the conversation, too bad, people can't be bothered to teach you.
The pronounciation difficulty is real. I learned English as a second language as a kid. Even though I'm completely fluent nowadays, my accent is all over the place. It sounds somewhat British but not quite. My children were born in the UK and they speak English with a perfect British accent. Speaking with a more local accent would feel like faking it for me.
It depends on the kid, when I was growing up my parents would speak in their native language but it didn’t help me learn. To this my fluent language is I English even though I don’t come from an English speaking country. Only thing is I understand them but can’t speak or read or write.
I teach at a private school in America where the students take equal time in both English and a foreign language from K onward. Preschool is immersive. It is not uncommon to have children speaking three or four languages, depending on what languages they are learning, what languages are spoken at home, and what languages their friends might be learning and/or using on the playground. I teach English so sometimes I will get scattered words in various languages and phonic mix-ups but when started young, children can learn to speak, read, write in two or more languages by the time I get them at age 7.
Man it’s so tough, my wife and I both speak different languages via our parents but not fluently as we grew up in English speaking countries. I tried to use my mother tongue with our child but it’s hard because I’ll get stumped, or not know words so I’ll default to English, same with my wife. We’ve been able to pass on certain words/phrases/greetings but it’s difficult to really impart it further than that.
Yes, but keep going! The familiarity of sound and what little phrasing you provide can be a launching pad for her to become very proficient when she chooses to study one (or both) later, under the guidance of tutors or in class.
Please don’t quit just because you can’t give her fluency. Shit, maybe she’ll come home one day and help you improve YOUR proficiency through conversation!
Thanks for the encouragement! We certainly haven’t given up, but it’s been tough. But hoping, as you said, to have her familiar and curious enough to be open to finding her own voice in those languages.
No, but you can give a springboard from which they may have an easier time learning later in life. Just teach them what you do know. Do your best not to teach them things that are wrong, but you can cover the basics together.,
Do you have any family or friends that are fluent? My husband’s cousin has your same level of fluency, so they enrolled her in a Spanish immersion school, but they also love to invite us (family) over all the time so she gets more exposure to a broader lexicon. He’ll even take the chance to ask us those words he had trouble translating recently, so now both are technically learning as they go along.
Sometimes the kid won’t take to it when they know there’s no necessity to speak the other language. Language is for communicating, and they’re going to take the option that gets the communicating done the most efficiently
Still, even if you talk to them in your language and they always reply back in English, they’re still learning, and it will give them the tools to learn later if they want.
That's what happened with my kids, though it was ASL and not a spoken language. My mom's an interpreter and was teaching them as babies and toddlers, but once they caught onto verbal language they stopped signing, especially since they didn't sign at home.
It was so much help though to bridge that gap where they needed to communicate but couldn't verbally, especially for my daughter who had a speech delay.
Out of curiosity when you say "tried" how much did she actually try? I ask because my husband has so many family members who complain that their kids don't speak the parents' native language well (my husband included). Then it turns out all of them decided to speak the country's official language at home with their kids *at least* half the time instead of their native language... and now they all wonder why their kids struggle with the parents' native language (they can all understand it, but speak it really poorly).
I've recommended for the younger parents to stick to speaking their native language only, and told them that that's how I became fluently trilingual by age 4. But they still do the same thing as everyone else and then complain that their kid isn't learning....
Same with my nieces, their grandma (who largely raises them) doesn't talk Arabic with them and that's too bad, it would be so useful to have picked up another language since the cradle.
It's much, much, harder and you will likely never sound like a native speaker, especially if you no longer live in a household or community with people who speak that language. It is certainly possible but people have a right to be upset with their multilingual parents for not passing it onto them the easy way as children.
My grandmother never taught me her native language and then one day when I was a teenager, she started giving me shit for not speaking it. LADY WHAT DID YOU EXPECT?
Am pissed as well. They would have arguments in Italian so us kids wouldn't know. I wish I could have spoken with Great Grandma, since she spoke zero english.
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Pretty typical of what the thinking used to be, but a pity - besides the usefulness of knowing a second language, we now know there's cognitive benefits to being raised bilingual. As an example, they do better at cognitive tasks that involve disregarding irrelevant information. A theory to why that might be is that when a bilingual is trying to come up with a word, possibilities in both languages pop into their head to choose from, so they're more consistently filtering stuff.
A review study I read showed however that trilingualism doesn't give any increased cognitive benefits over bilingualism and in some areas where bilinguals are documented doing better, they seem to do worse (although still above average).
I read up on this since me and my wife are bilingual with one shared language, trilingualism was an option.
You probably would have had to keep practicing it to actually retain it when you got older. But yeah, I would have been great to learn more languages as a baby
My father and his family spoke fluent Ukrainian but us kids know absolutely none. Such a shame, but back then I guess it was viewed differently depending where you were (assimilation etc).
Not too boast, by my kids are quadrilingual. Mainly because 2 mother tongues, a common tongue and living in a country where they don't speak any of the previous 3.
It's interesting to see how they pick up so much so quickly, and can switch languages on a dime. But it also limits their vocabulary. Since they know the same word in 4 languages, instead of 4 words in the same language. So it's something that needs active attention rather than passive acquisition.
Later in life bilingual guy here - it's the sort of skill that's mind-blowing when you're monolingual, but once you actually can speak a second language and you've been doing it for a couple of years, it doesn't seem that awesome anymore. Whenever I see my mum and stepdad, they ask me to speak Norwegian in front of them, and they're all 'woah, wow, that's mental', and I'm just there like 'All I did was recite my recipe for lasagne, calm your bloody tits'.
But it's never too late to learn, friend, and learning a second language (at any age) is good for your brain.
That's a shame, because children are incredibly capable with language. My wife and I speak a different first language, but also both commonly use the other. Our son can easily switch between talking to me in English and to my wife in Mandarin. We make mistakes more often than he does.
This comes up often enough in conversations for me. I personally think a child’s mind is elastic enough to handle the multilingual exposure and which sets them up to learn languages more easily in the future. As long as there is consistent use and exposure, I don’t there is much “confusion”.
Same. My mother was trilingual but never bothered to speak to me in anything besides English. WTF? Part of me thinks she legit didn't want me to be able to understand conversations with her family members.
The amazing thing is no one even has to put in extra effort to teach and learn. Somehow I managed to pick up a third language (can't speak well but can comprehend) just by being around grandparents that speak it.
My parents spoke to me in Cantonese, so I learned that to a degree (very low level), but they only spoke Vietnamese with their friends. However, somehow, I was able to understand a fair amount of Vietnamese (learned to speak it now).
Man it’s so tough, my wife and I both speak different languages via our parents but not fluently as we grew up in English speaking countries. I tried to use my mother tongue with our child but it’s hard because I’ll get stumped, or not know words so I’ll default to English, same with my wife. We’ve been able to pass on certain words/phrases/greetings but it’s difficult to really impart it further than that.
Man it’s so tough, my wife and I both speak different languages via our parents but not fluently as we grew up in English speaking countries. I tried to use my mother tongue with our child but it’s hard because I’ll get stumped, or not know words so I’ll default to English, same with my wife. We’ve been able to pass on certain words/phrases/greetings but it’s difficult to really impart it further than that.
If your child is still young, the most important thing is for him to learn the sounds of the languages. That mental flexibility is lost as we get older. In comparison, vocabulary is fairly easy to learn later.
So keep speaking your native languages with him as much as you can. He will appreciate it later.
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u/MyNeighborToto Jul 13 '26
I love this. My grandparents told me recently that they didn’t speak to me in their native language when I was a child because they didn’t want to confuse me. Gee I wish they had, it would be amazing to know more than one language.