Having A Baby - Bilingual

viewpoint says on Jan 5, 2006, 07:00:

Don't worry about teaching your baby the different languages as your baby has 100 times the mental capacity to learn and retain languages than an adult would have. Your baby will obsorb and retain the languages like a sponge.

My Colombian paisa stepson was 3 years old before he was exposed to english but his mother had taken two university courses in Medellin of english when I first met them. Within a few months my stepson just started speaking a few words of english, then sentences and soon it just poured out of him. Now at age 9 (almost 10) he is his mothers english translator. His mother has finished her degree in education (in a USA university) with a 3.2 grade point average but still relies on her son to translate many words in english. His concentration and education (5 years) in english has progressed at the expense of losing some of his spanish speaking skills.

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juanalejo says on Jan 5, 2006, 07:13:

Spanish While living in the US speak to the baby the most spanish as possible, if you move back to Colombia do the opposite. I have plenty of family who do that and all the children are perfectly bilingual.

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utopiacowboy says on Jan 5, 2006, 08:04:

Excellent advice in the above two posts.

Disclaimer: any comment I make is inane and is not to be taken seriously, and is so patently ridiculous that no one should take it seriously, even as an insult.

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thur says on Jan 5, 2006, 10:53:

True. My mother always spoke to me in Spanish, my first words were also in Spanish. At the same time my father and the family talked Dutch to me, then from TV I learned Dutch, at school one learns Dutch. I think one is aware pretty early that there are 2 languages spoken to you. Now, Dutch is ofcourse the primary language, but I can manage pretty well in Spanish and pick up new Spanish words easily from family when visiting or when reading the online papers... and Spanish helped learning French (which was/is obligatory for at least one year at school).
Greetings,

- pbase.com/thur

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COLDK says on Jan 5, 2006, 11:52:

bilingual kids I have a friend living in Miami for more than 5 years and has not learned english, so she speaks only spanish to the kids (02) and the husband who is also colombian. He speaks good english, but they speak spanish at home, the kids have learned how to speak english at school and now they speak to the father in english and of course the mother cant understand them, so finally she decided to start english clases. Kids speak both languages very well.

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dwmte says on Jan 5, 2006, 17:29:

i'm gonna make a presumption.... one of you is colombian and the other gringo/a if wrong, just forget the post.

my wife is paisa and our daughter is bi lingual. we didn't have to do squat, just speak. now my wife is a bit of an exception, she just doesn't want to speak english...it's eighteen years now! she can, a little, but that, poorly. pity. worth a fight? nah. but it has been a pain. soooooo since i made it a point to learn spanish, we speak spanish at home. our daughter speaks both, with ease. it's just not an issue, and it happens naturally.

forget buying a book. when you learned to speak, it wasn't out of a book, it was by listening to what was said around you. your contact with teachers and books was waaaaaay later. nuff said.

enjoy your child and just use your respective idioms and you'll have no problem raising a bi-lingual child. remember, when the child speaks/interacts with her respective grandparents (given the presumption above it true) she does so in their respective idioms.

peace,

dw

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Mr. Hollywood says on Jan 5, 2006, 19:14:

Don't worry The whole thing about "confusing" kids with multiple languages is just pure BS. Basically, I think it all started as a self-hating immigrant thing. My kids preschool is FULL of bi and tri-lingual kids who are all doing just fine.

Speak and they will learn.

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