Pediatrician and bilingual person here, love this video and want to bolster two of your points: 1a: Bilingualism absolutely does *not* cause speech delay. Language development is about children learning how to use sounds to communicate. That concept applies throughout all languages. That is also why young children cannot learn language from videos, because it isn't an interactive social experience. 1b: Speech delay screening should be done differently for bilingual children. A simple example is counting all the words your child has in all of their languages, not just in English. So you also have to let your pediatrician or school know about it, for your child to be screened properly. And if they aren't, even after that, then find someone else to do it. 2: You never know when they want to use another language you taught them. They might decide they want to use a language you teach them, decades later! I have experienced this in my immigrant community, where kids don't want to learn the home language when they were little, but then take language classes in college in their home language. 🤦♀️🤦♀️ **** My issue is that I naturally flip between two languages, and plan on doing that with my child. However, that method hasn't really been well described in the literature. Doing something not evidence based with my child makes me nervous as pediatrician. But I think they'll be ok. 😂😂
Same here. We are native Hungarians living in Brussels. Dad also speaks English, I speak German. It's a bit difficult to find the balance since our lingua franca is Hungarian and it is the easiest for us, so using the other languages is a bit random in our household, but I'm trying very hard. The easiest are for me the books. I buy them in all 3 languages and don't translate them, so they are always in the same languages. Hope it will be fine at the end of the day... :3
That second point is so incredibly true! I took Korean in college and I was a minority in learning it for the first time. Most of the class were Korean-American students who had learned some Korean from their parents and never used it...and now at the age of 20, it was their life goal to be fluent 😅
Hi, linguist here! The term for "naturally flipping between two languages" is called "codeswitching", and there are lots and lots of studies on codeswitching and its significance in bilingual/bicultural environments :)
@@mckenziet1021 Cool! Can you link me some? I'd be interested to read about it, because it's definitely what I do, and doesn't conform to traditional teaching (at least in my training in child development) regarding how to teach bilingualism.
2nd point really hit home for me! I'm a bilingual myself and only in my 30s have I started really appreciating my other language and seeking ways to communicate in it more (my primary school was in that language yet I managed to ignore it in favour of my dominant language for so many years). One of my kids is also an example of this. She didn't speak that language till she was 4.5.a work here, a phrase there, English speaking environment but at about 4.5 a floodgate opened. She speaks fluently using very advanced grammatical compositions and often prefers it to English to communicate with me :) with her I spoke it 90% of the time, we read books, I took her to clubs in that language, we played and we listened to music and sang.... Nothing... For 4.5 years... Till one week it all flipped. Obviously her English is great, it's a dominant language so learning 2 is not at the expense of one. So to add to your 1st point there's (1) clearly a cumulative effect and a tipping point and (2) it doesn't hinder development of 1 language! If I had to add (3) I nearly lost my mind telling my kid to pls repeat something in that language, my hubby grumbled that he doesn't understand it and it's very hard to continue without results.. But it works! And when results come it feels like a lifetime achievement award at the Oscars :) (4) I used some "speech starting" techniques for my other kid to kick start the other language... Yes I treated my child like a speech delayed kid and used speech therapy to kick start his bilingual journey earlier than 4.5. So far it's working :)
I'm half Greek half English. I live in the UK and I have a 14 months baby I spoke to him from birth English in the morning and Greek in the afternoon and now the past month he understands almost anything in both language and has starting saying few words in both as well.
Wow interesting... im Indonesian but of Chinese descent... I’ve been wondering about how I can teach my 18 m.o daughter Chinese since my whole family predominantly speaks Indonesian... but I’ll try this! Thank you!
@@complexgurl Hi, nice to know you. I’m also Indonesian with Chinese descent. I live in Japan and my 3yo child understand 3 languages. I love the idea of using different time or places to differ the languanges. We also use one person one language approach here..
@@complexgurl what I use for my daughter is a language per day, like this it gets less confusing for her. I don't necessarily switch the language everyday because it is easier to me (for example I speak one language for 3-4 days and then the other language for 3 -4 days and so on). Her dad speaks the local language to her (French) as it is his mother tongue. She is going to be 3 years old next week and she is able to understand and speak all 3 languages, although she creates phrases where she makes a mix of all 3 😊 if someone knows how to solve this please let us know.
My daughter is bilingual... She's approaching 3 years old now and she speaks both polish and english... My husband is Scottish and I'm Polish and we live in Poland so we do one parent one language method from birth but initially she was better in english. I think it was easier to say 'red' instead 'czerwony'. When she was about 18 months old it was about 70% English that she was using I never gave up and in next 6 months her polish was as good as english. Of course with time single words became sentences and now she likes to translate one language to another. Amazing! So proud!
Hi, our daughter is 2.5 years old. I am Polish, my husband is a Spanish speaker. We are using the same method as you. So far she's much better in Polish than Spanish although she understands most of what my husband is saying to her. Will you be teaching her to read in Polish as well? This is currently the thing I have on my mind. I would like her to be able to read and write in Polish as well down the line.
My parents came to the states back in the late 70's. When they started having kids in the 80's, they only spoke our home language to my eldest sister- it was her first language. When she started school, they told my parents that they have to speak English to her at home so that she can communicate with others. Flashforward, all my siblings and I speak English fluently, and struggle (to varying degrees) with speaking our home language (although we understand it fluently). My uncles saw this in us, so when they got married and started having kids, they raised their children to speak our home language (ignoring requests from their schools to teach English at home). Now my younger cousins are fluently bilingual. English came from the community and our language came from our family/home community. Now that I have a child, I'm learning to be fluent in my language to reverse the culture-loss and get my child fluent in both. Thankfully, my husband also speaks our home language fluently, so with our persistence, the mission is bound to succeed!
I foster bilingualism at home with my 2.5 year old daughter. I speak to her in English even though we are Polish. She loves watching your vlog and your girls and she can understand them!
This is amazing! We speak both English and Portuguese at home and it's so fascinating how quick our son has been able to pick up the languages. A little trick I did was grab a few of his favorite books (like Brown Bear, Brown Bear) and printed out the Portuguese translation and taped it into the book!) So we read it to him in English and my mother-in-law can read it to him in Portuguese 🥰 Absolutely love your videos! Keep up the amazing work!
We are raising our daughter bilingual as well... I have been speaking Dutch with her since birth and my husband speaks German with her. She understands both languages perfectly. I was worried about her hardly speaking any words besides mom and dad at the age of 23 months. Then I talked to a speech therapist who specialises in bilingual children and she told me that children who grow up bilingual will make a HUGE jump between the ages of 2 and 2,5 years old. She was right! Our daughter is now almost 29 months old and the difference between 23 months old and now are so big. She keeps on throwing out new words every day, sometimes even sentences 😊
I worked as a foreign language teacher in Italy and Japan for many years and could not encourage this enough!! Teaching kids a second language is amazing for their development as well as understandings of other cultures and IT IS NEVER TO EARLY! The youngest I taught was 6 months old ❤️ I was just about to do a similar video too 😂
@@mama2two138 well the little babies it was just immersion with songs and hand games. But once they started talking say around 1.5years old it was instantaneous, if they came in my classroom they’d speak Japanese with their parents but to me they would always say the English words we were focusing on. A lot of it is done through dance and play and games
When do you recommend introducing the 3rd language? We are living in Germany, I speak Romanian to our child, my husband speaks German to him, but we are speaking most of the time English. When would be the best to start speaking English to our son? He‘s 18 months old now. Thank you 😊
Linguist and mother of biracial baby here! One quick correction on this video: The "sensitive period" for language, known in linguistics as the Critical Period, is actually up to about age 12, but yes - the younger the better for fluency. As for what we do at home: my husband is from Japan and we expose our son to as much Japanese as possible by speaking it at home, listening to Japanese music, giving him time with his Japanese-speaking grandparents, and reading him stories in Japanese. We started doing this even before he was born because even babies in the womb can pick up on the tones of the languages around them and determine which is "their" language! We are also part of a Japanese children's book group where they read books and sing songs in Japanese once a week.
Thanks for sharing your experience!Can I ask you if you want to teach him also the Japanese alfabeths? I have a Japanese friend married with a swiss and their baby speaks English French German and Japanese.. The "problem" is that he doesn't know how to write it because it's really complicated and it requires lots of time.. Plus I don't know if I understood correctly but are there different alfabeths in Japanese?!
@@Itscipens I do want to teach him at least hiragana/katakana, but neither my husband or I are very good with kanji. Of course, my son’s name is Japanese and has kanji so we want him to at least be able to write his name:)
I cannot stress the first point enough. Start young! I started learning English at 8 years old, when we moved to the states, and my brother learned English once he entered Kindergarten around 5 or 6. And even though the difference between those ages is so small (just 2-3 years), the end result is so noticeable. I still have a small accent and still cannot say that I pick up vocabulary as a native speaker-I have to work at it. My brother 100% sounds like he is native and his vocabulary at 15 is comparable to mine lol. He is actually so fluent in both, that he can translate from one to the other real-time as conversations are happening. I need the speaker to finish a sentence before I can translate. And I am the creative/language loving/artistic one between the two of us. Those few years do make SUCH a difference. And I want to highlight the other point you made about bilingual kids not having delays-again, so so true. They are just processing. Depending on which language they're more comfortable with vs what language they're being spoken to, they may very literally be translating in their mind as they're being spoken to. I spent most of my middle school hears doing that, and a lot of teachers gave up calling on me because I needed time to process if they had a follow up question. And no, no development delays or learning delays from bilingualism. In fact, I think that being fluent in 2 languages, and then learning 2 more is what helped me graduate college a year early. Bilingual kids end up just thinking differently!
Thank you for making a video about fostering bilingualism, Ashley! It's really comforting to hear your insights, as well as everyone's experiences here below. We have 5 languages in our mix - each having personal or practical importance. It was really a challenge to decide how we'll use it in front of our little one. For now, we've decided on: dad speaks French and mom speaks Dutch with her. When we're all together, we're using English, which is how I communicate with my hubby normally. Dutch is the dominant language of the community, but my actual family language is Chinese. However, given that my little one only goes to daycare one day a week and has relatively little interaction with the outside world due to Covid, I chose to teach her the dominant community language first. At least she will feel part of a wider world around her through language. I plan to switch back to Chinese once she goes to daycare or kindergarten full-time. Then the next question will be: which version of Chinese🙈
I can't agree with the statement that children don't learn language through screens etc. This will not be as effective as speaking to your child face to face, mostly children with a simple exposure to the language through cartoons or songs will though acquire the sounds and the words, they might not produce the language, but later they will understand it, it will be easier to learn that language later. I myself am such a person, whose only exposure to English were cartoons on Cartoon Network. I started learning English at school at the age of 15 and I just moved from level to level much quicker than the other students. My brain had just to remember all what I heard at the age of 4 or 5 when I watched the cartoons. I speak Silesian to my child, and my husband speaks Polish. My daughter listens to English while I'm reading a book or sing to her, or through some cartoons or your vlogs 😉. She already speaks some English 🙂
Screens are not recommended for under the age of 4. Beyond the age of four, learning other languages from videos and TV shows, movies (as you mentioned you did at the age of 4 or 5), is much more feasible. :) Not so much for babies and toddlers. There was a very interesting study done on this that you can listen to in this really amazing Ted talk: www.ted.com/talks/patricia_kuhl_the_linguistic_genius_of_babies?language=en
I speak to my daughter in english but this is not my mother language. I expose my daughter to screens (only selected programs) and I see how easily she picks up the words in different contexts and accent. But of course the screen time is very limited (age appropriate) but it can be a complementary resource for learning the language.
Hi, I just want to recommend some other gorgeous books about this topic: 1. Naomi Steiner "7 steps how to raise a bilingual child" 2. Annika Bourgogne "Be bilingual - practical ideas for multilingual families" 3. Dr. Xiao-lei Wang "Growing up with three languages"
Does anyone know the best place to find children’s literature and toys/activities in other languages? My biggest struggle is finding children’s books and educational toys/activities in Portuguese! Children’s books are often $30+ each online, and not even high quality literature. And I can’t find other materials in Portuguese at all. I’m American, but lived in Brazil for a year and a half, and speak fluent Portuguese. My husband is Brazilian, so he obviously speaks Portuguese, but also speaks English (sometimes better than me haha) and Spanish. We are raising our son speaking Portuguese and English, and live in the US. The struggle is real!
Where in US do you live? There are some big Brazilian communities in some areas, like Florida and maybe they have those kind of materials? Do you ever travel to Brazil? I always buy new Portuguese books to my son when I visit my family.
Is anyone able to ship books in Portugese from Brazil to you? Or is there a local bookstore that sells them? We were able to find a few books in Korean and Russian for our home on Amazon for an ok price, and there is a large community of both here, so we have a small bookstore for each we can visit, but we are mainly going to rely on our in-laws sending Korean books for her until we can visit again. Luckily I still have all my Russian books. For all of the other materials, I plan to start translating and printing out on my own since that will really be the only way to get something in both languages for my daughter 🤷🏼♀️
We are trying to do the 1 parent pone language in our household. it's hard as my husband doesn't speak Bulgarian well enough and it's not the outside language either. I have been doing that from birth and were very fortunate to spend some time with my parents where my daughter was exposed to a lot of Bulgarian. She is 15 m. o. and has a few words in Bulgarian, understands a lot of things in Bulgarian. With her starting Nursery, she's started saying words in English as they are also much easier to pronounce ( cup vs. chasha, ball vs. topka etc.). I try to have very low expectations so I take pressure out of the situation, as that is quite prevalent in Immigrant environments. I find it hard to constantly switch from English to Bulgarian, especially when flustered so it's a challenge for me, but I try my best. We have a few books and when watching something I narrate or point/ ask questions in Bulgarian. As hard as it is I still hope I manage to give her some basis on which in the future she can build if she wants to.
That's the issue with English-it is just so much easier in some ways than a lot of our mother tongues 😅 We had the same issue with my brother-he was fluent in Russian-speaking, reading, and even writing a bit, but as soon as he started Kindergarten in English and gained fluency in it, reading and writing in Russian went out the window. We had to work really hard on maintaining a "Russian only at home" rule to make sure he still remembers how to speak it. Luckily, at 15, he still can speak it, but he definitely prefers English.
Any tips on how to teach baby sign language to a bilingual baby? My son is 6 months old and I just started introducing some signs to him but I'm not sure if I should be saying the word in both languages/ say sometimes in one and other times in the other/ only say in one language. Also, I just want to say I love your videos, I'm going through a depression but watching your videos has got me excited about parenting and being the best momma to my lil boy, thankyou!
My son is also 6 months old! We are using ASL signs (so English-based signs) only, but using both the Japanese and English words to describe the sign if that makes sense. That's just what we are doing rather than trying to incorporate two signing systems all at once.
@@mckenziet1021 yeah, I think two signing systems would be too complicated! So far I have just been saying the words in English while signing but when he is one he will go to daycare and there they will speak to him in portuguese, so it might come in handy him knowing the word of the sign in portuguese too! I was just worried it might all be too confusing
Hi! So interesting! But I have to say that when the COVID thing started, my son stop receiving input in English because we had zero contact with the community and we only speak Spanish at home. And I can say FOR SURE that switching his screen time to English helped A LOT, and he was only 2.5 yo. And I know what he learned from TV was actually useful because months later I heard him communicate with native English speakers using entire frases that he heard from those videos... I'm not refusing the studies (lol I'm not an expert), but in my experience, videos where extremely helpful... And also music... And that recommendation came also by Laleo Bilingual Therapy, whom experienced the same thing with her older daughter.
Yesss! We are a bilingual family - I speak fluent Swedish and fluent English, my children's father lives in England and only speaks English. Our sons live with me and I speak both languages to them..
Does anyone have any tips for getting children into learning other languages when both parents are monolingual (except for the odd phrases) speaking English and we live in the UK?
This is so much harder with covid, but is there a community or communities of other cultures around you? It is hard for a child to have the need or motivation to speak and learn a different language if the 2 main people in his/her life don't use it. But having a friend or a few from a different background and with another language may be the necessary motivation and exposure they need. Because even if the child is old enough for exposure through movies and shows, if there isn't a need to use that language, they will lose interest. My community is a mix of Russian and Korean. I speak Russian, but most of my friends in school were Korean. Eventually that motivated me to take Korean in college so I could understand them and their culture better.
I still remember (as if it was yesterday) the precise moment I felt a strong fascination for another language for the first time (I was 5 I think, and 35 now): a man standing with his violin, playing some cheerful country music and singing loudly in English, in the "texan sector" of a theme park: I was struck by the energy of the sound, amazed at the power of those vibrations so I guess I started associating that amazing feeling of joy I felt to the sound of English. The reason why I want to share this, is to reinforce the fact that to motivate a child to learn a language it is important to trigger good feelings such as fun, fascination, awe, or simply, as you said, that it is worth doing it because it is a key that will open so many doors for them. Thank you so much for this video; I don't have kids yet, but if I'll be a parent I would love to raise them bilingual :)
One of my colleagues is italian, his wife is turkish. They talk german to their daughters. Her family though speaks exclusively turkish to them and his parents do the same in italian. This is in Germany.
Absolutely! They will still pick it up past 4, but it will be as a foreign language vs a native language. They're set up so much better for success if we start early!
I am an English teacher and have a 9 month old. I speak to him in English but not consistently so this is a great reminder!! Thanks for your video 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼
Thank you again for this video. I'm one of those parents who get carried away as I'm a foreigner and I've always used both languages when speaking to him but I've never read books in my language so thank you for the reminder.
Hi. I am Ranjita from India, and I have a 3.5 year old daughter. She is a great kid. As a parent somedays are good some moments are not my best. How do you always know what is the right thing to say to the child, to make them co-operate. Love your videos. They give me hope, happiness and are quite calming. Also do share your not so proud moments as a parent, and how you rectified/ changed.
I’m Brazilian and my husband is Peruvian. We speak Portuguese and Spanish respectively to our son since birth. He is 18 month old and understands everything we say to him. He’s starting to talk in both languages. We live in the US so he also gets exposed to English; however, he doesn’t understand much yet. Speaking languages is just natural in our home and we’re trying to teach this to our son. We follow the OPAL method-one parent, one language. My brother-in-law and his wife are teaching Spanish, Russian and English to their kids since birth. They are 6 and 4 y/o and having great success too.
I'd love to hear more from people who are teaching their children a language that one parent is fluent in, while the other parent has limited vocabulary. My husband speaks Bengali, Hindi, and English fluently--I pretty much just speak English so that is our home language. It's also the dominant language where we live. However, we would like to do the 1 parent, 1 language thing, but not sure how to do this with conversations as a family (I am trying to learn Bengali and Hindi but it's a challenge at this stage of life/with the limited exposure).
I'm facing this challenge too. I'm fluent in both English and Chinese but my husband only speaks English. So whenever he's in the room, it's very hard for me to stick to Chinese.
My husband and i mainly speak in English but we would like them to learn our parents language which is Gujarati. Our gujarati isn't great and neither us can write or read it. What would be advise in this case? Loving all your videos by the way! Such wealth of knowledge. I know i can get this information from books but it's nice to also have this in videos (not many people are doing such videos at such length). Thank you so much for sharing so much.
Thanks for the video!! This is so helpful! We use Korean at home and my 2.5 year old cannot speak English right now. When I try to read him in English, he refuses to read...:( We live is US and I’m worried he may have negative experience when he first goes to preschool. Any advice?
I am bilingual and and have a degree in language acquisition. I agree with what she said. I think the "one parent, one language" model is very good, also. I raised my two boys this way, and now they have asked me to speak to their babies, my grandchildren, in the target (non-dominant) language. For inspiration, there is a archive of Bilingual Family Newsletters online that can be accessed, and is completely chock-full of all the theory and practice of how to raise a bilingual child. It's an invaluable resource for those who are truly serious about raising bilingual children.
Thanks for the great video Ashley! Great to know your husband is Taiwanese, as I am Taiwanese myself with a British husband. have questions about the bilingual environment for my son, wonder if you can give any suggestions? At moment I speak Chinese and English to my son, mainly English because I found it strange when I speak my home language in the kids class or the cafe when having a gathering with other English mums. Sometimes I need other people surrounding us to understand what I'm talking to my son, so the conversation goes on. So I found it hard to stick one parent one language policy. If I switch one language to another based on the situation, would that confuse him? Also, I found that funny if I only speak my home language, and my husband doesn't understand what I'm talking to our son... Thanks!
Yoruba is the African language most widely spoken outside of Africa -- so a child living elsewhere would have more of a chance to speak Yoruba with a native-speaker than any other African language. So. How would you go about translating Yoruba lessons for non-native speaking adults into Montessori Method Yoruba for babies, on up? I was thinking take the baby to your online Yoruba classes or in person ones. Learn and sing Yoruba songs. Ask your teacher for help translating into Yoruba sentences for regular Montessori parent talk -- poz parenting speak. And finally, retrofitting Montessori language curriculum materials yourself into Yoruba.
Every family is unique and I’m not really sure how to approach mine. I am fluent in Spanish but I was born and raised here so English is my first language, only speaking Spanish with my parents/grandparents. I have two kids, Mila will be 3 years old at the end of June & Liam will be 1 year old July 1st. I want them to be fluent in Spanish too but with their dad being Caucasian and not knowing Spanish - we only speak to them & each other in English. Any recommendations on how I can make sure they learn Spanish with English? I have made sure my parents speak to them solely in Spanish since that is their first language but that’s only when they see them. I also read to them in Spanish but it’s seems to confuse her a little bit since she already knows what it is in English.
Interesting. In most African homes we speak at least 3 languages and they are all done simultaneously, and 2 languages taught in school. E.g English and Swahili. The third one is what we call 'mother tongue'. So when I speak to my elders, I speak my mother tongue, when out and about English and Swahili is interchangeable. When casually speaking the words are interchangeable within the three languages.
I am a bit concerned that I am doing this wrong. We live in Catalonia, thus, two language involved: Catalan and Spanish. I am from Poland and when I am alone with my son, I speak Polish. With my husband I speak Spanish mixed often with English, because we are so used to speak English with eachother. I learn Catalan but still cannot speak or read well, however, I sing songs in that language to my son. What bothers me is my Spanglish. How it will turn out, we are about to see. For now my son understands all three languages and starts speaking a few words in each of them. He is almost a year old. I have no idea what to do with English, it is not my native language but I keep using it anyway - my kid can be confused with that.
Yeesss this has clarified the exact reason why I should indeed stick to my home language with my baby girl (at 10 months she is understanding so many phrases and words signing some words back i am so suprised hahaha) and use English with my uk accent and have her dad continue sticking to his home language and then allow her to naturally pick up English in (Montessori🤞) school and then on a few days a week we will speak arabic as a family so i can learn it from my husband too lol
So we are a family living in UK, my son is 20 months old. I am hungarian and my husband is brazilian but because we speak english between us, my son prefer english over the other 2 and I find it hard to balance it out and often I just go with it and speak english with him but realy want him to learn hungarian and speak as a native, I am just wondering that sometimes he does not understand what I am talking about and that I am confusing him. Any advice how to balance this?
Ashley, curiosity, do you speak Mandarin? If not (or not yet), do you feel isolated when dad speaks with ur girls and u dont understand what they r talking or laughing about?
my husband and i speak both filipino and english. my husband started learning spanish a year ago and his progress has been quite fast as he fully immersed himself in the language. we decided that i'll be speaking to our 31 month old daughter in both english and filipino while he will only speak to her in spanish.we read to her and let her listen to songs and watch kid shows in spanish and english too. i could say that she's just absorbing everything really well. she speaks and understands some spanish now, mainly communicates in filipino and english and it is indeed amazing! don't be afraid to introduce languages that you know to your children, the earlier you do so, the easier it will be for them.
Thank you for all the work you do on this channel! It has been a life saver these last couple months. My whole family is benefiting from implementing the techniques and resources you supply!
What about if a child develops a stutter? We were advised by a speech therapist to take a bit of a break to see how things went. Thankfully it got better and we were then advised to keep going with the other languages - as long as we didn't our child give any pressure.
Hi Ashley, I absolutely love your channel! This video is dear to my heart, since we speak two languages in home. Thanks for sharing this info. Could you share some of the resources you found?
I am from Serbia and my husband is from Greece. I speak only my mother tongue with my 10 month old baby, and my husband only greek. I was thinking to start speaking english with my husband (now we speak greek between us). Do you think it is a good idea?
Where do you reside? Is it an English speaking community? We are following the same method you are doing with our almost 10 month old. I speak Russian, dad speaks Korean, and we speak Korean between us (tho we do slip up and use English sometimes). Our plan is to stick with that because she will naturally pick up English in the community-we still have to make calls in English, speak English with her doctor, at the store, etc. English is also a lot easier to speak for kids than other languages, and they tend to switch to English once they pick it up (others here are also noting the same problem), so I'm not in a rush for her to pick it up!
@@natasagrujicgr Ah in that case, speaking English between you and your husband would be beneficial in getting exposure to it! No chance of baby missing out on Greek in the community. I would definitely go ahead and add English in!
Hey Ashley! As an italian native speaker I have to say that my life wouldn't be the same if I hadn't learnt English! First of all because I can enjoy this amazing channel of yours, and write a letter to you! :))) Secondly, because the most meaningful encounters I had in my life were with people whom I met abroad while travelling around Europe when I was in my 20s, so English was a passpartout that represented an opportunity to communicate in cultural backgrounds that were different than my own; bilingualism was my key to sharing ideas with interesting people, and this had a major impact in shaping my mind and my sensitivity. I would probably be a totally different person now if I hadn't studied it! You're doing such a great job with your girls!
@@Itscipens Verissimo Chiara, tre ore di lingua alla settimana su classi di 25-30 persone hanno un impatto davvero lieve. Lo dico da English teacher! 😅
Question: At 0:25, you mentioned that your husband speaks Mandarin Chinese, but in your other video “OUR TODDLER HAS MUSCLES” at 18:04, he said “Mm zai ah” (唔栽) and “jiat beung” (食笨) for “I don’t know” and “food is ready”, which in Mandarin would be “(wo) bu zhidao” (（我）不知道）and “chi fan le” (吃饭了), so I was just curious if he always mixes the two dialects together. We are also an American and Chinese couple (living in southern China though), and my husband’s native tongue sounds quite similar to Taiwanese (Teochew/Southern Min), which is why I could recognize his words. 😅 However, these dialects are kind of slowly fading out among the younger generation (maybe that’s why some people didn’t fully understand him when you guys visited Taiwan). When our little one arrives, I hope we will be able to successfully implement some of your lovely teaching tips and tricks here. Thanks for sharing!
We are a billingual family (Portuguese and German) and while I can read both languages, my partner can only read german. Any idea if I should only stick to the Portuguese books, when my toddler asks me to read with her?
I try to do one parent one language with Portuguese and Spanish, but I read more to my son then my husband does. I sometimes read Spanish book for him if he asked me too. And sometimes, I translated them.
@@HapaFamily Thank you for your answer! We def do one parent, one language in our house, except in reading and singing ;) but we can be more aware with those things too.
@@vivianpolikar4446 Yes, sometime I translate as I am reading, but most of the time I just read as is! But will try to translate more in the future - or at least until she starts to read!
So if videos aren’t recommended, how do I try to expose my child to another language if I don’t speak that language and don’t have access to native speakers of it? 😕
Hi, I am a linguist and I just want to clear up that while videos and songs are not ideal for picking up a language fluently, your child can still absolutely learn from those things! Try reading books in the target language or joining a group for children/speakers of the target language if you don't know any native speakers. Real-life interaction is the best for language learning, but we are fortunate to live in a time where we do have videos/songs/etc. available to us to expose our children to other languages.
My daughter and son in law are planning to teach my grandson both French and English. He is 4 months old and he has been read to daily in both languages- English by mom and French by dad. The same for speaking. My daughter only speaks English and dad speaks only French to him. I will share this video with them! Thanks for the info!
So grateful for this video!!!! I am really wanting to teach my kids tagalog but I only speak a little bit of it. We will literally be learning together
Hi, maybe someone can help me. I'm an indonesian and my husband too. We both speak Indonesian language as well as our daily. But i do love to my baby could understand english. Here I'm the only one who understand English but in intermediate level. May i know what should i do with this. Our community all speak indonesian language.🙏
How old is your baby? Since you know English, even if it is not native, seems in your current situation, you're the best source of English for your baby! Read, sing songs (you can play them in the background throughout the day for other people's pronunciation and accents to be in your baby's life), and talk about as much as you can with your baby in English. There are also teachers online who teach English via video, live one-on-one or group classes. Outschool is one of the sites my friends use to teach, but I know there are more. Once your baby is an older toddler, that can be a good way for additional speaking, listening, and grammar skills!
@@MariaandMontessori my baby is 5months old now. I usually sing a song and read the book. But i afraid of mispronounced some vocabulary because I'm not that good in english
About books: I live in Sweden and get a lot of books from the library every week. When I read to my son (1y 8m), I translate in real time to my native language (Portuguese) and, of course, I don't necessarily memorize the words and order I use so, every time, I read the books slightly different. My son does not seem to bother but I do notice he prefers that his father (native Swedish speaker) reads to him. I wonder if it is because with his father the vocabulary is consistent and the sentences rhyme (when it is the case). Do you have an opinion about this?
Useful video as usual, thank you. I would like to know, from Ashley or any of the people who have commented here about how they describe one thing (say, a crow) in three languages. Does the child get confused? Thanks again.
Thanks so much for this!! I have so many of your videos in “Watch Later” I just went ahead & subscribed.😊 afraid I made some mistakes with trying to teach my daughter (now 4) Spanish. Her father grew up bilingual, but not myself...so I did put videos on for her, now I see she only uses the words from them that we continued to use irl. Expecting her sister this summer, so hopefully we can do better early on this time!☺️ your sister video is next on my playlist heehee
As always THANK YOU. Among all your videos I think this is one of my favorites! We are Italians parents living in a French speaking country and our baby goes to a Montessori bilingual childcare (EN-FR). We speak to him only in Italian but of course we use other languages depending on the people we are with. I also speak Spanish and a basic German and I noticed my baby understands some Spanish words (maybe beacuse similar to Italian or French?!). I personally think this is the most precious gift I can give to my child. Languages are keys to understand this big weird amazing world.
Thank you so much for sharing your insights! Agree with all of your points! We speak three languages at home and it’s funny that both of my girls picked up mom’s language (Mandarin Chinese) first. No wonder they call it the “mother tone”. :) Two more points I’d like to emphasize from my own experience: 1. Travel (after Covid) makes a huge difference for the minor language to come out. They boost interest in that culture/language from their own experience. 2. Friends! We on purposely set play dates for my girls in other languages and again it’s about growing the interest/inner motivation. Now my older girl is 4, I’ll start using your language matching suggestion at home to teach reading/writing.
Thanks for sharing your research with us! Back home, we have a trilingual education system, and all children fluently speak at least two languages by the time they start middle school. And this is even true for children with special needs. I now live in the US. My native language is Catalan, and my husband’s Spanish. We both have been talking to our now 13 months old in our native languages from day one (and it is so much fun, because I understand what my husband says, but he doesn’t 😜). Before our baby was born I asked my American friends with International parents that are actually fluent in their language how they did it. They had this “I don’t understand what you’re saying” rule whenever they spoke English at home, and that’s the approach we are taking. He’s right now a bit confused because daycare is in English, but I know he will eventually take over and at least understand all three languages 🙃
Thank you for a great video full a good insights and advices 🤗 My son is 19months old and we speak English in the morning and french (local language) after the nap and until bedtime. It’s funny how I can switch languages, for example, I am more likely to switch to french when I need an instruction to be understood and when I need to console my son, I am always speaking in English which is not my native language but a language that I’ve learned along the way through talking, travelling, reading a lot and watching American tv shows! People say that we shall not speak a non native language to our kids because we might pass along grammatical mistakes but at least I’m passing along another language to my son which is the most spoken on the planet. Everybody (ish) speaks English!
Hello Ashley. Maybe I'm not on the topic asking, tell me please which toothpaste is better to use for a child 1,5 years old ? Thank you. I like your channel vlog
Hi. Our country has over 50 languages. We speak two. Our mother tongue (hindi) and english. I am trying to lern Spanish (I am 9) I love learning it. It is actually really simple.
Hi! Can you please do another Montessori Day in the Life? That was the very first video I watched by you & seeing little Kylie brush her teeth & make her breakfast had me HOOKED! I subscribed immediately and began planning to be a Montessori as I was pregnant with my first at the time
This video is great! I'm teacher at a local Montesorri nursery in London and couldn't be more greatful for your videos. Also I wanted to ask you what camera are you using here? The quality is amazing. Thank you so much for posting these videos💖
i would definitely appreciate a video about how to implement montessori principles in a daycare classroom! i’m a teacher for 2 year olds and between changing diapers/potty training and trying to navigate through each child’s specific needs, it can get super difficult to maintain an appropriate montessori learning environment while still meeting state regulations. i’ve definitely been trying to apply montessori principles but it can get overwhelming when you have 7 toddlers to look after 😅
As a kid, our school taught us arabic as a first language and then english and french, it is now in our culture :p Now as a mother i love teaching my 2.5 years old daughter all three languages for vocabs, we are in Australia but we communicate in arabic only, it has been so great so far and we don't have any trouble except when strange people try to talk in english with her she can't communicate with them, but its fine to me
but then what if everything is in one language but my wish for them to learn two? all swedish here, i really wanna start my kids off w english really early as i have found it soo valuable for me to be comfortable with it and cant believe my peers that are not and dont desire to be. my parents would use english to talk over my head when i was little haha and mom started me off w a little scrapbook of words and phrases in english before we started learning in 3d grade. it didnt give me much more than the concept of other language and some interest but it was cute and nice:)
This is a random question but have you looked into Finnish education (hei schools) I recently heard about it and was wondering if you like it and how it compares to montessori.
Growing up my parents spoke both Mandarin Chinese and our local Chinese dialect to me. I started learning English around 5. I have always found picking up a new language or accent easy for me. And I have always found learning a new language fun because my early English exposure was a fun experience. I learnt something that my parents and other kids didn't know much about and I was proud of myself. That pride definitely fostered my learning interest and helped me getting through the learnings at school. So with that personal experience, I definitely believe the early natural exposure will help the language learning for years. My son is now 10 month old and I'm trying to raise him bilingual. My biggest struggle is vocabulary. I find myself saying the same things over and over again to him. I tried different ways to increase vocabulary from reading books to describing daddy's actions when he's doing chores. XD Not sure how successful I am but I'll try my best everyday. The other problem I have is that daddy only speaks English. Whenever he's around, I feel like I have to speak English to be inclusive. So I feel like my son is getting much more exposure to English than Chinese. I wonder if this would impact how much of each language my son would pick up. I'm currently imagining him knowing food related words in Chinese and play related words in English. Because our baby has assigned our roles for us. "I eat with Mama and I play with Baba." XD
My daughter is almost 10 months-I speak Russian to her and dad speaks Korean. We try to avoid English since we live in the states and she will pick it up from her surroundings. For topics, I have stated talking to her like an adult. My dreams, aspirations, what I'm thinking about. It's the only way I could ensure I'm challenging the vocabulary I'm giving her (aside from books)! Dad has a harder time with this though lol. And we have gotten accustomed to the OPOL thing-I do understand Korean enough to know what he is saying to her, but he doesn't speak Russian at all. He has started picking some words up from hearing me talk to her all the time, but anyway it is a conversation between her and I, so he doesn't feel excluded 🤷🏼♀️ We had agreed we both want her to know both languages, so it was an inconvenience we were willing to accept. Maybe your husband will pick up on some Chinese!
I would be interested to know where you read that linguists have expanded the definition of bilingualism to fluency (& maybe literacy, which is reading & writing, not just speaking) in more than 2 languages, rather than multilingualism, and when they defined it as 2 or more being used in the home, rather than fluently, regularly by the individual accomplished in more than one language. Or is it just educators redefining this for mostly K-12 usage to understand the child's skill sets and home environment? I am educated in languages and language arts and am not familiar with this. The sounds and rhythms of languages differ significantly, so early learning is far preferable. Immersion learning is so important and formation of sounds made with the mouth. Your girls are lucky because Mandarin, English & Spanish are the most commonly used languages on earth, by native speakers and by others, as well. You are so right that learning another language will not delay educational development in children. Interestingly, I have a friend who was an immigrant as a child speaking only Spanish and was placed with a family speaking English only until his parents got settled into jobs and a new home. Talk about immersion learning. Anyway, he studied Romance languages in college and beyond because he loves them. However, he claims now, well into adulthood, that people assume he finds Spanish easiest to speak and he does not. One reason for this, as a language arts scholar, is that he did most of his higher learning from middle school onward in English, so many more complex or nuanced topics, subjects are easier for him in English since he didn't learn them in Spanish.
Thanks (as always) for your insightful thoughts! With regard to your question about the use of the term “bilingualism”, I learned this from the work of Eowyn Crisfield. (Edited to add: I think it’s more so intended as a synonymous usage - that bilingualism can ALSO refer to 3+ languages, and isn’t necessarily replacing the term “multilingualism”.)
For those who are implementing one parent, one language, what do you do when your toddler brings you a book in the other language? Unfortunately, our English library by far exceeds our Mandarin library, and I’m not always able to translate the books (despite being a native speaker) in a way that’s satisfactory to me and my toddler.
We typically translate to the best of our abilities, but my husband struggles with translating some English stories into Korean since English is his second language. So sometimes he just tells a story that he makes up based on the pictures, and that becomes the "Korean" version. Isn't ideal though, because the vocabulary is definitely simpler. We have found some books on Amazon that already include a Korean and English translation-I wonder if there is something similar you could implement?
Any thoughts on virtual lessons with a private tutor for a three year old and a four year old when parents do not speak that target language? I would think that is considered person to person learning even though it is on a screen? Also any other tips for parents who do not speak the target language? Thank you!
I agree that it is more closely related to in person. It is not ideal, but far better than passively absorbing (or, actually, not really absorbing) from a show. Songs and audio books could also be a great supplement in your case!
I am an Italian living in Germany with my husband, who is a Russian-speaking German, and our 22-months-old daughter. I exclusively speak Italian to her (as well as my parents, every day via video chat), while she learns German from her father, daycare and outside world. She also has exposure to some English, as it is the language my husband and I use to communicate, and Russian from her father's family. She started speaking relatively recently and still uses only one-word sentences. We see that she understands a lot of German and Italian but in speaking she always chooses the easiest word from those languages. So she would always use the Italian words for some animals and the German words for others, even though she knows and recognizes both. We try to get appropriate books in all these languages but it's not always easy.
I have a very similar situation:) I'm Russian living in Germany with my Italian husband and our 21-month-old son. We chose OPOL approach and I speak exclusively Russian with our child, whereas my husband speaks Italian with him. Our son goes to the German-speaking daycare. With my husband we communicate in English. So, our son is exposed to four languages, though Russian & Italian are dominating. English is in a passive mode right now, and I'm asking myself, when and how to start introducing it without putting too much pressure on him and without major reduction of spoken time in other minority languages...
@@ekaterinakapitanova67 we are close to similar, but just 3 languages. Russian from me, Korean from dad, and English out in the world. I'm not worried about English tho because it is so much easier to pick up for kids and they tend to prefer it over something as complicated as Russian or Korean. So I don't plan on introducing it at all at home-her exposure in the world and then full immersion in the school will be plenty!
Our daughter(now almost 29 months old) is also picking out the easiest words although she knows the words in both languages. You really notice this when you ask her something 😊 She really started to use more words right around the age of 24 months. I used to be really insecure about her being so late with speaking until I talked to a speech therapist who said to me that the biggest speech jump for bilingual children will happen between 2 to 2,5 years old and she was absolutely right 😊. I really wished I had known this earlier (cause I couldn’t find that info anywhere) so that I wouldn’t have been so insecure about it. At the moment we get to hear a lot of new words and sometimes even sentences now 😊
I grew up in a bilingual home, but my dad was often absent and he didn't keep up speaking in his language with me and my sisters so in the end he gave up and we didn't learn it fluently, which is such a pity and such a big chunk of culture from his side that we have been missing because of it! Now I'm expecting my first child and we will need to balance between 4 different languages at our home, so we're still trying to figure out how exactly that will work but I'm determined to teach my native language (as we don't live there) because that is so important if I want them to learn and understand the culture.
Pediatrician and bilingual person here, love this video and want to bolster two of your points:
1a: Bilingualism absolutely does *not* cause speech delay. Language development is about children learning how to use sounds to communicate. That concept applies throughout all languages. That is also why young children cannot learn language from videos, because it isn't an interactive social experience.
1b: Speech delay screening should be done differently for bilingual children. A simple example is counting all the words your child has in all of their languages, not just in English. So you also have to let your pediatrician or school know about it, for your child to be screened properly. And if they aren't, even after that, then find someone else to do it.
2: You never know when they want to use another language you taught them. They might decide they want to use a language you teach them, decades later! I have experienced this in my immigrant community, where kids don't want to learn the home language when they were little, but then take language classes in college in their home language. 🤦♀️🤦♀️
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My issue is that I naturally flip between two languages, and plan on doing that with my child. However, that method hasn't really been well described in the literature. Doing something not evidence based with my child makes me nervous as pediatrician. But I think they'll be ok. 😂😂
Same here. We are native Hungarians living in Brussels. Dad also speaks English, I speak German. It's a bit difficult to find the balance since our lingua franca is Hungarian and it is the easiest for us, so using the other languages is a bit random in our household, but I'm trying very hard. The easiest are for me the books. I buy them in all 3 languages and don't translate them, so they are always in the same languages. Hope it will be fine at the end of the day... :3
That second point is so incredibly true! I took Korean in college and I was a minority in learning it for the first time. Most of the class were Korean-American students who had learned some Korean from their parents and never used it...and now at the age of 20, it was their life goal to be fluent 😅
Hi, linguist here! The term for "naturally flipping between two languages" is called "codeswitching", and there are lots and lots of studies on codeswitching and its significance in bilingual/bicultural environments :)
@@mckenziet1021 Cool! Can you link me some? I'd be interested to read about it, because it's definitely what I do, and doesn't conform to traditional teaching (at least in my training in child development) regarding how to teach bilingualism.
2nd point really hit home for me! I'm a bilingual myself and only in my 30s have I started really appreciating my other language and seeking ways to communicate in it more (my primary school was in that language yet I managed to ignore it in favour of my dominant language for so many years). One of my kids is also an example of this. She didn't speak that language till she was 4.5.a work here, a phrase there, English speaking environment but at about 4.5 a floodgate opened. She speaks fluently using very advanced grammatical compositions and often prefers it to English to communicate with me :) with her I spoke it 90% of the time, we read books, I took her to clubs in that language, we played and we listened to music and sang.... Nothing... For 4.5 years... Till one week it all flipped. Obviously her English is great, it's a dominant language so learning 2 is not at the expense of one. So to add to your 1st point there's (1) clearly a cumulative effect and a tipping point and (2) it doesn't hinder development of 1 language!
If I had to add (3) I nearly lost my mind telling my kid to pls repeat something in that language, my hubby grumbled that he doesn't understand it and it's very hard to continue without results.. But it works! And when results come it feels like a lifetime achievement award at the Oscars :)
(4) I used some "speech starting" techniques for my other kid to kick start the other language... Yes I treated my child like a speech delayed kid and used speech therapy to kick start his bilingual journey earlier than 4.5. So far it's working :)
I'm half Greek half English. I live in the UK and I have a 14 months baby I spoke to him from birth English in the morning and Greek in the afternoon and now the past month he understands almost anything in both language and has starting saying few words in both as well.
Wow interesting... im Indonesian but of Chinese descent... I’ve been wondering about how I can teach my 18 m.o daughter Chinese since my whole family predominantly speaks Indonesian... but I’ll try this! Thank you!
@@complexgurl Hi, nice to know you. I’m also Indonesian with Chinese descent. I live in Japan and my 3yo child understand 3 languages. I love the idea of using different time or places to differ the languanges. We also use one person one language approach here..
@@complexgurl what I use for my daughter is a language per day, like this it gets less confusing for her. I don't necessarily switch the language everyday because it is easier to me (for example I speak one language for 3-4 days and then the other language for 3 -4 days and so on). Her dad speaks the local language to her (French) as it is his mother tongue. She is going to be 3 years old next week and she is able to understand and speak all 3 languages, although she creates phrases where she makes a mix of all 3 😊 if someone knows how to solve this please let us know.
My daughter is bilingual... She's approaching 3 years old now and she speaks both polish and english... My husband is Scottish and I'm Polish and we live in Poland so we do one parent one language method from birth but initially she was better in english. I think it was easier to say 'red' instead 'czerwony'. When she was about 18 months old it was about 70% English that she was using I never gave up and in next 6 months her polish was as good as english.
Of course with time single words became sentences and now she likes to translate one language to another. Amazing! So proud!
Hi, our daughter is 2.5 years old. I am Polish, my husband is a Spanish speaker. We are using the same method as you. So far she's much better in Polish than Spanish although she understands most of what my husband is saying to her. Will you be teaching her to read in Polish as well? This is currently the thing I have on my mind. I would like her to be able to read and write in Polish as well down the line.
My parents came to the states back in the late 70's. When they started having kids in the 80's, they only spoke our home language to my eldest sister- it was her first language. When she started school, they told my parents that they have to speak English to her at home so that she can communicate with others.
Flashforward, all my siblings and I speak English fluently, and struggle (to varying degrees) with speaking our home language (although we understand it fluently). My uncles saw this in us, so when they got married and started having kids, they raised their children to speak our home language (ignoring requests from their schools to teach English at home). Now my younger cousins are fluently bilingual. English came from the community and our language came from our family/home community.
Now that I have a child, I'm learning to be fluent in my language to reverse the culture-loss and get my child fluent in both. Thankfully, my husband also speaks our home language fluently, so with our persistence, the mission is bound to succeed!
I foster bilingualism at home with my 2.5 year old daughter. I speak to her in English even though we are Polish. She loves watching your vlog and your girls and she can understand them!
This is amazing! We speak both English and Portuguese at home and it's so fascinating how quick our son has been able to pick up the languages. A little trick I did was grab a few of his favorite books (like Brown Bear, Brown Bear) and printed out the Portuguese translation and taped it into the book!) So we read it to him in English and my mother-in-law can read it to him in Portuguese 🥰
Absolutely love your videos! Keep up the amazing work!
That’s a great idea. I have so much trouble finding books in Russian.
We are raising our daughter bilingual as well... I have been speaking Dutch with her since birth and my husband speaks German with her. She understands both languages perfectly. I was worried about her hardly speaking any words besides mom and dad at the age of 23 months. Then I talked to a speech therapist who specialises in bilingual children and she told me that children who grow up bilingual will make a HUGE jump between the ages of 2 and 2,5 years old. She was right! Our daughter is now almost 29 months old and the difference between 23 months old and now are so big. She keeps on throwing out new words every day, sometimes even sentences 😊
I worked as a foreign language teacher in Italy and Japan for many years and could not encourage this enough!! Teaching kids a second language is amazing for their development as well as understandings of other cultures and IT IS NEVER TO EARLY! The youngest I taught was 6 months old ❤️
I was just about to do a similar video too 😂
That’s so cool you worked in both countries! How long did it take for the kids to start learning?
I always wanted to live in Japan! Must have been amazing. Love your channel too, we also do EC!
@@mama2two138 well the little babies it was just immersion with songs and hand games. But once they started talking say around 1.5years old it was instantaneous, if they came in my classroom they’d speak Japanese with their parents but to me they would always say the English words we were focusing on. A lot of it is done through dance and play and games
@@jennyp8243 we love EC!! Was such an amazing experience with our son. Thanks for checking us out too!
When do you recommend introducing the 3rd language? We are living in Germany, I speak Romanian to our child, my husband speaks German to him, but we are speaking most of the time English. When would be the best to start speaking English to our son? He‘s 18 months old now. Thank you 😊
Linguist and mother of biracial baby here!
One quick correction on this video: The "sensitive period" for language, known in linguistics as the Critical Period, is actually up to about age 12, but yes - the younger the better for fluency.
As for what we do at home: my husband is from Japan and we expose our son to as much Japanese as possible by speaking it at home, listening to Japanese music, giving him time with his Japanese-speaking grandparents, and reading him stories in Japanese. We started doing this even before he was born because even babies in the womb can pick up on the tones of the languages around them and determine which is "their" language! We are also part of a Japanese children's book group where they read books and sing songs in Japanese once a week.
Thanks for sharing your experience!Can I ask you if you want to teach him also the Japanese alfabeths? I have a Japanese friend married with a swiss and their baby speaks English French German and Japanese.. The "problem" is that he doesn't know how to write it because it's really complicated and it requires lots of time.. Plus I don't know if I understood correctly but are there different alfabeths in Japanese?!
@@Itscipens I do want to teach him at least hiragana/katakana, but neither my husband or I are very good with kanji. Of course, my son’s name is Japanese and has kanji so we want him to at least be able to write his name:)
I cannot stress the first point enough. Start young! I started learning English at 8 years old, when we moved to the states, and my brother learned English once he entered Kindergarten around 5 or 6. And even though the difference between those ages is so small (just 2-3 years), the end result is so noticeable. I still have a small accent and still cannot say that I pick up vocabulary as a native speaker-I have to work at it. My brother 100% sounds like he is native and his vocabulary at 15 is comparable to mine lol. He is actually so fluent in both, that he can translate from one to the other real-time as conversations are happening. I need the speaker to finish a sentence before I can translate. And I am the creative/language loving/artistic one between the two of us. Those few years do make SUCH a difference.
And I want to highlight the other point you made about bilingual kids not having delays-again, so so true. They are just processing. Depending on which language they're more comfortable with vs what language they're being spoken to, they may very literally be translating in their mind as they're being spoken to. I spent most of my middle school hears doing that, and a lot of teachers gave up calling on me because I needed time to process if they had a follow up question. And no, no development delays or learning delays from bilingualism. In fact, I think that being fluent in 2 languages, and then learning 2 more is what helped me graduate college a year early. Bilingual kids end up just thinking differently!
Thank you for making a video about fostering bilingualism, Ashley! It's really comforting to hear your insights, as well as everyone's experiences here below.
We have 5 languages in our mix - each having personal or practical importance. It was really a challenge to decide how we'll use it in front of our little one. For now, we've decided on: dad speaks French and mom speaks Dutch with her. When we're all together, we're using English, which is how I communicate with my hubby normally. Dutch is the dominant language of the community, but my actual family language is Chinese. However, given that my little one only goes to daycare one day a week and has relatively little interaction with the outside world due to Covid, I chose to teach her the dominant community language first. At least she will feel part of a wider world around her through language. I plan to switch back to Chinese once she goes to daycare or kindergarten full-time. Then the next question will be: which version of Chinese🙈
Both version maybe😂😂😂
I teach Spanish and French to little kids and YES! All . Of . This.
I can't agree with the statement that children don't learn language through screens etc. This will not be as effective as speaking to your child face to face, mostly children with a simple exposure to the language through cartoons or songs will though acquire the sounds and the words, they might not produce the language, but later they will understand it, it will be easier to learn that language later. I myself am such a person, whose only exposure to English were cartoons on Cartoon Network. I started learning English at school at the age of 15 and I just moved from level to level much quicker than the other students. My brain had just to remember all what I heard at the age of 4 or 5 when I watched the cartoons.
I speak Silesian to my child, and my husband speaks Polish. My daughter listens to English while I'm reading a book or sing to her, or through some cartoons or your vlogs 😉. She already speaks some English 🙂
Screens are not recommended for under the age of 4. Beyond the age of four, learning other languages from videos and TV shows, movies (as you mentioned you did at the age of 4 or 5), is much more feasible. :) Not so much for babies and toddlers. There was a very interesting study done on this that you can listen to in this really amazing Ted talk: www.ted.com/talks/patricia_kuhl_the_linguistic_genius_of_babies?language=en
I speak to my daughter in english but this is not my mother language. I expose my daughter to screens (only selected programs) and I see how easily she picks up the words in different contexts and accent. But of course the screen time is very limited (age appropriate) but it can be a complementary resource for learning the language.
Hi, I just want to recommend some other gorgeous books about this topic:
1. Naomi Steiner "7 steps how to raise a bilingual child"
2. Annika Bourgogne "Be bilingual - practical ideas for multilingual families"
3. Dr. Xiao-lei Wang "Growing up with three languages"
Thanks for sharing these! ❤️
Does anyone know the best place to find children’s literature and toys/activities in other languages? My biggest struggle is finding children’s books and educational toys/activities in Portuguese! Children’s books are often $30+ each online, and not even high quality literature. And I can’t find other materials in Portuguese at all.
I’m American, but lived in Brazil for a year and a half, and speak fluent Portuguese. My husband is Brazilian, so he obviously speaks Portuguese, but also speaks English (sometimes better than me haha) and Spanish.
We are raising our son speaking Portuguese and English, and live in the US. The struggle is real!
The comment left here from Claudia Sofia Santos sounds like it might be really helpful for you! 😊
Where in US do you live? There are some big Brazilian communities in some areas, like Florida and maybe they have those kind of materials? Do you ever travel to Brazil? I always buy new Portuguese books to my son when I visit my family.
Is anyone able to ship books in Portugese from Brazil to you? Or is there a local bookstore that sells them? We were able to find a few books in Korean and Russian for our home on Amazon for an ok price, and there is a large community of both here, so we have a small bookstore for each we can visit, but we are mainly going to rely on our in-laws sending Korean books for her until we can visit again. Luckily I still have all my Russian books. For all of the other materials, I plan to start translating and printing out on my own since that will really be the only way to get something in both languages for my daughter 🤷🏼♀️
We are trying to do the 1 parent pone language in our household. it's hard as my husband doesn't speak Bulgarian well enough and it's not the outside language either. I have been doing that from birth and were very fortunate to spend some time with my parents where my daughter was exposed to a lot of Bulgarian. She is 15 m. o. and has a few words in Bulgarian, understands a lot of things in Bulgarian. With her starting Nursery, she's started saying words in English as they are also much easier to pronounce ( cup vs. chasha, ball vs. topka etc.). I try to have very low expectations so I take pressure out of the situation, as that is quite prevalent in Immigrant environments. I find it hard to constantly switch from English to Bulgarian, especially when flustered so it's a challenge for me, but I try my best.
We have a few books and when watching something I narrate or point/ ask questions in Bulgarian.
As hard as it is I still hope I manage to give her some basis on which in the future she can build if she wants to.
That's the issue with English-it is just so much easier in some ways than a lot of our mother tongues 😅 We had the same issue with my brother-he was fluent in Russian-speaking, reading, and even writing a bit, but as soon as he started Kindergarten in English and gained fluency in it, reading and writing in Russian went out the window. We had to work really hard on maintaining a "Russian only at home" rule to make sure he still remembers how to speak it. Luckily, at 15, he still can speak it, but he definitely prefers English.
Any tips on how to teach baby sign language to a bilingual baby? My son is 6 months old and I just started introducing some signs to him but I'm not sure if I should be saying the word in both languages/ say sometimes in one and other times in the other/ only say in one language.
Also, I just want to say I love your videos, I'm going through a depression but watching your videos has got me excited about parenting and being the best momma to my lil boy, thankyou!
My son is also 6 months old! We are using ASL signs (so English-based signs) only, but using both the Japanese and English words to describe the sign if that makes sense. That's just what we are doing rather than trying to incorporate two signing systems all at once.
@@mckenziet1021 yeah, I think two signing systems would be too complicated! So far I have just been saying the words in English while signing but when he is one he will go to daycare and there they will speak to him in portuguese, so it might come in handy him knowing the word of the sign in portuguese too! I was just worried it might all be too confusing
Hi! So interesting! But I have to say that when the COVID thing started, my son stop receiving input in English because we had zero contact with the community and we only speak Spanish at home. And I can say FOR SURE that switching his screen time to English helped A LOT, and he was only 2.5 yo. And I know what he learned from TV was actually useful because months later I heard him communicate with native English speakers using entire frases that he heard from those videos... I'm not refusing the studies (lol I'm not an expert), but in my experience, videos where extremely helpful... And also music...
And that recommendation came also by Laleo Bilingual Therapy, whom experienced the same thing with her older daughter.
Yesss! We are a bilingual family - I speak fluent Swedish and fluent English, my children's father lives in England and only speaks English. Our sons live with me and I speak both languages to them..
Does anyone have any tips for getting children into learning other languages when both parents are monolingual (except for the odd phrases) speaking English and we live in the UK?
This is so much harder with covid, but is there a community or communities of other cultures around you? It is hard for a child to have the need or motivation to speak and learn a different language if the 2 main people in his/her life don't use it. But having a friend or a few from a different background and with another language may be the necessary motivation and exposure they need. Because even if the child is old enough for exposure through movies and shows, if there isn't a need to use that language, they will lose interest. My community is a mix of Russian and Korean. I speak Russian, but most of my friends in school were Korean. Eventually that motivated me to take Korean in college so I could understand them and their culture better.
I still remember (as if it was yesterday) the precise moment I felt a strong fascination for another language for the first time (I was 5 I think, and 35 now): a man standing with his violin, playing some cheerful country music and singing loudly in English, in the "texan sector" of a theme park: I was struck by the energy of the sound, amazed at the power of those vibrations so I guess I started associating that amazing feeling of joy I felt to the sound of English. The reason why I want to share this, is to reinforce the fact that to motivate a child to learn a language it is important to trigger good feelings such as fun, fascination, awe, or simply, as you said, that it is worth doing it because it is a key that will open so many doors for them. Thank you so much for this video; I don't have kids yet, but if I'll be a parent I would love to raise them bilingual :)
That's amazing! Thanks for sharing!!
One of my colleagues is italian, his wife is turkish. They talk german to their daughters. Her family though speaks exclusively turkish to them and his parents do the same in italian. This is in Germany.
Your videos are always so amazing.
This is so great! I was always thinking it needed to be before age 12. We will now focus on getting our kids learning before age 4.
As a foreign language teacher I couldn’t agree more! The earlier the better!
Absolutely! They will still pick it up past 4, but it will be as a foreign language vs a native language. They're set up so much better for success if we start early!
I am an English teacher and have a 9 month old. I speak to him in English but not consistently so this is a great reminder!! Thanks for your video 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼
Thank you again for this video. I'm one of those parents who get carried away as I'm a foreigner and I've always used both languages when speaking to him but I've never read books in my language so thank you for the reminder.
Hi. I am Ranjita from India, and I have a 3.5 year old daughter. She is a great kid. As a parent somedays are good some moments are not my best. How do you always know what is the right thing to say to the child, to make them co-operate. Love your videos. They give me hope, happiness and are quite calming. Also do share your not so proud moments as a parent, and how you rectified/ changed.
I’ve never been this early to any video ever
I’m Brazilian and my husband is Peruvian. We speak Portuguese and Spanish respectively to our son since birth. He is 18 month old and understands everything we say to him. He’s starting to talk in both languages. We live in the US so he also gets exposed to English; however, he doesn’t understand much yet. Speaking languages is just natural in our home and we’re trying to teach this to our son. We follow the OPAL method-one parent, one language.
My brother-in-law and his wife are teaching Spanish, Russian and English to their kids since birth. They are 6 and 4 y/o and having great success too.
I'd love to hear more from people who are teaching their children a language that one parent is fluent in, while the other parent has limited vocabulary. My husband speaks Bengali, Hindi, and English fluently--I pretty much just speak English so that is our home language. It's also the dominant language where we live. However, we would like to do the 1 parent, 1 language thing, but not sure how to do this with conversations as a family (I am trying to learn Bengali and Hindi but it's a challenge at this stage of life/with the limited exposure).
I'm facing this challenge too. I'm fluent in both English and Chinese but my husband only speaks English. So whenever he's in the room, it's very hard for me to stick to Chinese.
My husband and i mainly speak in English but we would like them to learn our parents language which is Gujarati. Our gujarati isn't great and neither us can write or read it. What would be advise in this case? Loving all your videos by the way! Such wealth of knowledge. I know i can get this information from books but it's nice to also have this in videos (not many people are doing such videos at such length). Thank you so much for sharing so much.
Thanks for the video!! This is so helpful! We use Korean at home and my 2.5 year old cannot speak English right now. When I try to read him in English, he refuses to read...:( We live is US and I’m worried he may have negative experience when he first goes to preschool. Any advice?
Start from birth was advice from my paediatrician. I started with 6 languages. 😁 It was not easy 😅
I am bilingual and and have a degree in language acquisition. I agree with what she said. I think the "one parent, one language" model is very good, also. I raised my two boys this way, and now they have asked me to speak to their babies, my grandchildren, in the target (non-dominant) language. For inspiration, there is a archive of Bilingual Family Newsletters online that can be accessed, and is completely chock-full of all the theory and practice of how to raise a bilingual child. It's an invaluable resource for those who are truly serious about raising bilingual children.
Thanks for the great video Ashley! Great to know your husband is Taiwanese, as I am Taiwanese myself with a British husband. have questions about the bilingual environment for my son, wonder if you can give any suggestions? At moment I speak Chinese and English to my son, mainly English because I found it strange when I speak my home language in the kids class or the cafe when having a gathering with other English mums. Sometimes I need other people surrounding us to understand what I'm talking to my son, so the conversation goes on. So I found it hard to stick one parent one language policy. If I switch one language to another based on the situation, would that confuse him? Also, I found that funny if I only speak my home language, and my husband doesn't understand what I'm talking to our son...
Thanks!
Yoruba is the African language most widely spoken outside of Africa -- so a child living elsewhere would have more of a chance to speak Yoruba with a native-speaker than any other African language. So. How would you go about translating Yoruba lessons for non-native speaking adults into Montessori Method Yoruba for babies, on up? I was thinking take the baby to your online Yoruba classes or in person ones. Learn and sing Yoruba songs. Ask your teacher for help translating into Yoruba sentences for regular Montessori parent talk -- poz parenting speak. And finally, retrofitting Montessori language curriculum materials yourself into Yoruba.
Every family is unique and I’m not really sure how to approach mine.
I am fluent in Spanish but I was born and raised here so English is my first language, only speaking Spanish with my parents/grandparents. I have two kids, Mila will be 3 years old at the end of June & Liam will be 1 year old July 1st. I want them to be fluent in Spanish too but with their dad being Caucasian and not knowing Spanish - we only speak to them & each other in English. Any recommendations on how I can make sure they learn Spanish with English? I have made sure my parents speak to them solely in Spanish since that is their first language but that’s only when they see them. I also read to them in Spanish but it’s seems to confuse her a little bit since she already knows what it is in English.
Interesting. In most African homes we speak at least 3 languages and they are all done simultaneously, and 2 languages taught in school. E.g English and Swahili. The third one is what we call 'mother tongue'. So when I speak to my elders, I speak my mother tongue, when out and about English and Swahili is interchangeable. When casually speaking the words are interchangeable within the three languages.
I am a bit concerned that I am doing this wrong. We live in Catalonia, thus, two language involved: Catalan and Spanish. I am from Poland and when I am alone with my son, I speak Polish. With my husband I speak Spanish mixed often with English, because we are so used to speak English with eachother. I learn Catalan but still cannot speak or read well, however, I sing songs in that language to my son. What bothers me is my Spanglish. How it will turn out, we are about to see. For now my son understands all three languages and starts speaking a few words in each of them. He is almost a year old. I have no idea what to do with English, it is not my native language but I keep using it anyway - my kid can be confused with that.
Yeesss this has clarified the exact reason why I should indeed stick to my home language with my baby girl (at 10 months she is understanding so many phrases and words signing some words back i am so suprised hahaha) and use English with my uk accent and have her dad continue sticking to his home language and then allow her to naturally pick up English in (Montessori🤞) school and then on a few days a week we will speak arabic as a family so i can learn it from my husband too lol
So we are a family living in UK, my son is 20 months old. I am hungarian and my husband is brazilian but because we speak english between us, my son prefer english over the other 2 and I find it hard to balance it out and often I just go with it and speak english with him but realy want him to learn hungarian and speak as a native, I am just wondering that sometimes he does not understand what I am talking about and that I am confusing him. Any advice how to balance this?
Great video today!!!
In my home we speak 4 languages and this give me a lot a help to improve our jorney.
I love your chanel!!!
Ashley, curiosity, do you speak Mandarin?
If not (or not yet), do you feel isolated when dad speaks with ur girls and u dont understand what they r talking or laughing about?
my husband and i speak both filipino and english. my husband started learning spanish a year ago and his progress has been quite fast as he fully immersed himself in the language. we decided that i'll be speaking to our 31 month old daughter in both english and filipino while he will only speak to her in spanish.we read to her and let her listen to songs and watch kid shows in spanish and english too. i could say that she's just absorbing everything really well. she speaks and understands some spanish now, mainly communicates in filipino and english and it is indeed amazing! don't be afraid to introduce languages that you know to your children, the earlier you do so, the easier it will be for them.
Thank you. I need to step up my game and start speaking in my home language. I stopped mixing up the languages to help her hear just one.
Thank you for all the work you do on this channel! It has been a life saver these last couple months. My whole family is benefiting from implementing the techniques and resources you supply!
So exited! I've always wondered about this and there isn't that much online that takes a Montessori approach. Thank you Ashley
What about if a child develops a stutter? We were advised by a speech therapist to take a bit of a break to see how things went. Thankfully it got better and we were then advised to keep going with the other languages - as long as we didn't our child give any pressure.
I know your kids aren't old but do you have any videos about doing montessori with older children?
How are we able to give our daughter a second language if we only speak English?
I’d love to hear some personal insights from your own family’s bilingual journey so far!
Just ask those kids whose parents don't speak English and the kids speak both.
Hi Ashley, I absolutely love your channel! This video is dear to my heart, since we speak two languages in home. Thanks for sharing this info.
Could you share some of the resources you found?
I put links to a few of them in the description box! :)
Thank you so so much, Ashley 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼
❤
I am from Serbia and my husband is from Greece. I speak only my mother tongue with my 10 month old baby, and my husband only greek. I was thinking to start speaking english with my husband (now we speak greek between us). Do you think it is a good idea?
Where do you reside? Is it an English speaking community? We are following the same method you are doing with our almost 10 month old. I speak Russian, dad speaks Korean, and we speak Korean between us (tho we do slip up and use English sometimes). Our plan is to stick with that because she will naturally pick up English in the community-we still have to make calls in English, speak English with her doctor, at the store, etc. English is also a lot easier to speak for kids than other languages, and they tend to switch to English once they pick it up (others here are also noting the same problem), so I'm not in a rush for her to pick it up!
@@MariaandMontessori We live in Greece.
@@natasagrujicgr Ah in that case, speaking English between you and your husband would be beneficial in getting exposure to it! No chance of baby missing out on Greek in the community. I would definitely go ahead and add English in!
Thank you for sharing 🥰
What a good timing for this video. Thank you!
Hey Ashley! As an italian native speaker I have to say that my life wouldn't be the same if I hadn't learnt English! First of all because I can enjoy this amazing channel of yours, and write a letter to you! :))) Secondly, because the most meaningful encounters I had in my life were with people whom I met abroad while travelling around Europe when I was in my 20s, so English was a passpartout that represented an opportunity to communicate in cultural backgrounds that were different than my own; bilingualism was my key to sharing ideas with interesting people, and this had a major impact in shaping my mind and my sensitivity. I would probably be a totally different person now if I hadn't studied it! You're doing such a great job with your girls!
Concordo! Peccato che in Italia l'inglese nelle scuole sia ancora molto sottovalutato!
@@Itscipens Verissimo Chiara, tre ore di lingua alla settimana su classi di 25-30 persone hanno un impatto davvero lieve. Lo dico da English teacher! 😅
So timely for me. Thanks ma'am🥳
Question: At 0:25, you mentioned that your husband speaks Mandarin Chinese, but in your other video “OUR TODDLER HAS MUSCLES” at 18:04, he said “Mm zai ah” (唔栽) and “jiat beung” (食笨) for “I don’t know” and “food is ready”, which in Mandarin would be “(wo) bu zhidao” (（我）不知道）and “chi fan le” (吃饭了), so I was just curious if he always mixes the two dialects together. We are also an American and Chinese couple (living in southern China though), and my husband’s native tongue sounds quite similar to Taiwanese (Teochew/Southern Min), which is why I could recognize his words. 😅 However, these dialects are kind of slowly fading out among the younger generation (maybe that’s why some people didn’t fully understand him when you guys visited Taiwan). When our little one arrives, I hope we will be able to successfully implement some of your lovely teaching tips and tricks here. Thanks for sharing!
We are a billingual family (Portuguese and German) and while I can read both languages, my partner can only read german. Any idea if I should only stick to the Portuguese books, when my toddler asks me to read with her?
I would lean toward Portuguese, so long as your husband is also spending equal time speaking with her in German. :) It’s all about equal input!
I try to do one parent one language with Portuguese and Spanish, but I read more to my son then my husband does. I sometimes read Spanish book for him if he asked me too. And sometimes, I translated them.
@@HapaFamily Thank you for your answer! We def do one parent, one language in our house, except in reading and singing ;) but we can be more aware with those things too.
@@vivianpolikar4446 Yes, sometime I translate as I am reading, but most of the time I just read as is! But will try to translate more in the future - or at least until she starts to read!
So if videos aren’t recommended, how do I try to expose my child to another language if I don’t speak that language and don’t have access to native speakers of it? 😕
My kid did learn numers and some words in English from songs.
Hi, I am a linguist and I just want to clear up that while videos and songs are not ideal for picking up a language fluently, your child can still absolutely learn from those things! Try reading books in the target language or joining a group for children/speakers of the target language if you don't know any native speakers. Real-life interaction is the best for language learning, but we are fortunate to live in a time where we do have videos/songs/etc. available to us to expose our children to other languages.
@@mckenziet1021 thanks so much for thr clarification!!
My daughter and son in law are planning to teach my grandson both French and English. He is 4 months old and he has been read to daily in both languages- English by mom and French by dad. The same for speaking. My daughter only speaks English and dad speaks only French to him. I will share this video with them! Thanks for the info!
hallo it's very nice
So grateful for this video!!!! I am really wanting to teach my kids tagalog but I only speak a little bit of it. We will literally be learning together
Hi, maybe someone can help me.
I'm an indonesian and my husband too. We both speak Indonesian language as well as our daily. But i do love to my baby could understand english. Here I'm the only one who understand English but in intermediate level. May i know what should i do with this. Our community all speak indonesian language.🙏
How old is your baby? Since you know English, even if it is not native, seems in your current situation, you're the best source of English for your baby! Read, sing songs (you can play them in the background throughout the day for other people's pronunciation and accents to be in your baby's life), and talk about as much as you can with your baby in English. There are also teachers online who teach English via video, live one-on-one or group classes. Outschool is one of the sites my friends use to teach, but I know there are more. Once your baby is an older toddler, that can be a good way for additional speaking, listening, and grammar skills!
@@MariaandMontessori my baby is 5months old now. I usually sing a song and read the book. But i afraid of mispronounced some vocabulary because I'm not that good in english
About books: I live in Sweden and get a lot of books from the library every week. When I read to my son (1y 8m), I translate in real time to my native language (Portuguese) and, of course, I don't necessarily memorize the words and order I use so, every time, I read the books slightly different. My son does not seem to bother but I do notice he prefers that his father (native Swedish speaker) reads to him. I wonder if it is because with his father the vocabulary is consistent and the sentences rhyme (when it is the case). Do you have an opinion about this?
Useful video as usual, thank you. I would like to know, from Ashley or any of the people who have commented here about how they describe one thing (say, a crow) in three languages. Does the child get confused? Thanks again.
Thanks so much for this!! I have so many of your videos in “Watch Later” I just went ahead & subscribed.😊
afraid I made some mistakes with trying to teach my daughter (now 4) Spanish. Her father grew up bilingual, but not myself...so I did put videos on for her, now I see she only uses the words from them that we continued to use irl.
Expecting her sister this summer, so hopefully we can do better early on this time!☺️ your sister video is next on my playlist heehee
As always THANK YOU.
Among all your videos I think this is one of my favorites!
We are Italians parents living in a French speaking country and our baby goes to a Montessori bilingual childcare (EN-FR).
We speak to him only in Italian but of course we use other languages depending on the people we are with.
I also speak Spanish and a basic German and I noticed my baby understands some Spanish words (maybe beacuse similar to Italian or French?!).
I personally think this is the most precious gift I can give to my child. Languages are keys to understand this big weird amazing world.
Thank you so much for sharing your insights! Agree with all of your points! We speak three languages at home and it’s funny that both of my girls picked up mom’s language (Mandarin Chinese) first. No wonder they call it the “mother tone”. :) Two more points I’d like to emphasize from my own experience: 1. Travel (after Covid) makes a huge difference for the minor language to come out. They boost interest in that culture/language from their own experience. 2. Friends! We on purposely set play dates for my girls in other languages and again it’s about growing the interest/inner motivation. Now my older girl is 4, I’ll start using your language matching suggestion at home to teach reading/writing.
Thanks for sharing your research with us! Back home, we have a trilingual education system, and all children fluently speak at least two languages by the time they start middle school. And this is even true for children with special needs.
I now live in the US. My native language is Catalan, and my husband’s Spanish. We both have been talking to our now 13 months old in our native languages from day one (and it is so much fun, because I understand what my husband says, but he doesn’t 😜).
Before our baby was born I asked my American friends with International parents that are actually fluent in their language how they did it. They had this “I don’t understand what you’re saying” rule whenever they spoke English at home, and that’s the approach we are taking. He’s right now a bit confused because daycare is in English, but I know he will eventually take over and at least understand all three languages 🙃
Thank you for a great video full a good insights and advices 🤗
My son is 19months old and we speak English in the morning and french (local language) after the nap and until bedtime.
It’s funny how I can switch languages, for example, I am more likely to switch to french when I need an instruction to be understood and when I need to console my son, I am always speaking in English which is not my native language but a language that I’ve learned along the way through talking, travelling, reading a lot and watching American tv shows!
People say that we shall not speak a non native language to our kids because we might pass along grammatical mistakes but at least I’m passing along another language to my son which is the most spoken on the planet. Everybody (ish) speaks English!
Hello Ashley. Maybe I'm not on the topic asking, tell me please which toothpaste is better to use for a child 1,5 years old ? Thank you. I like your channel vlog
Hi. Our country has over 50 languages. We speak two. Our mother tongue (hindi) and english. I am trying to lern Spanish (I am 9) I love learning it. It is actually really simple.
Thank you for sharing. We speak English & Greek. I’m 8 weeks pregnant with my 1st baby & was about this topic. I love your video.❤️😘
Hi! Can you please do another Montessori Day in the Life? That was the very first video I watched by you & seeing little Kylie brush her teeth & make her breakfast had me HOOKED! I subscribed immediately and began planning to be a Montessori as I was pregnant with my first at the time
This video is great! I'm teacher at a local Montesorri nursery in London and couldn't be more greatful for your videos.
Also I wanted to ask you what camera are you using here? The quality is amazing.
Thank you so much for posting these videos💖
i would definitely appreciate a video about how to implement montessori principles in a daycare classroom! i’m a teacher for 2 year olds and between changing diapers/potty training and trying to navigate through each child’s specific needs, it can get super difficult to maintain an appropriate montessori learning environment while still meeting state regulations. i’ve definitely been trying to apply montessori principles but it can get overwhelming when you have 7 toddlers to look after 😅
As a kid, our school taught us arabic as a first language and then english and french, it is now in our culture :p
Now as a mother i love teaching my 2.5 years old daughter all three languages for vocabs, we are in Australia but we communicate in arabic only, it has been so great so far and we don't have any trouble except when strange people try to talk in english with her she can't communicate with them, but its fine to me
but then what if everything is in one language but my wish for them to learn two? all swedish here, i really wanna start my kids off w english really early as i have found it soo valuable for me to be comfortable with it and cant believe my peers that are not and dont desire to be.
my parents would use english to talk over my head when i was little haha and mom started me off w a little scrapbook of words and phrases in english before we started learning in 3d grade. it didnt give me much more than the concept of other language and some interest but it was cute and nice:)
This is a random question but have you looked into Finnish education (hei schools) I recently heard about it and was wondering if you like it and how it compares to montessori.
Thank you for this video! Ensuring that my daughter is bilingual has always been so important to me. Thank you for these useful pointers ❤️
I LOVE TO LEARN WITH YOU! I'm here everyday. Please receive a warm hug from this very thankful mother over here 🤗💞
Would absolutely love more videos on this - such a dearth of information for bilingual families :)
This is so helpful! I love you’re channel. Thanks for doing all this research
Please speak more on bilingualism!!!! Thanks for this!!
Love this!
Growing up my parents spoke both Mandarin Chinese and our local Chinese dialect to me. I started learning English around 5. I have always found picking up a new language or accent easy for me. And I have always found learning a new language fun because my early English exposure was a fun experience. I learnt something that my parents and other kids didn't know much about and I was proud of myself. That pride definitely fostered my learning interest and helped me getting through the learnings at school. So with that personal experience, I definitely believe the early natural exposure will help the language learning for years. My son is now 10 month old and I'm trying to raise him bilingual. My biggest struggle is vocabulary. I find myself saying the same things over and over again to him. I tried different ways to increase vocabulary from reading books to describing daddy's actions when he's doing chores. XD Not sure how successful I am but I'll try my best everyday. The other problem I have is that daddy only speaks English. Whenever he's around, I feel like I have to speak English to be inclusive. So I feel like my son is getting much more exposure to English than Chinese. I wonder if this would impact how much of each language my son would pick up. I'm currently imagining him knowing food related words in Chinese and play related words in English. Because our baby has assigned our roles for us. "I eat with Mama and I play with Baba." XD
My daughter is almost 10 months-I speak Russian to her and dad speaks Korean. We try to avoid English since we live in the states and she will pick it up from her surroundings. For topics, I have stated talking to her like an adult. My dreams, aspirations, what I'm thinking about. It's the only way I could ensure I'm challenging the vocabulary I'm giving her (aside from books)! Dad has a harder time with this though lol. And we have gotten accustomed to the OPOL thing-I do understand Korean enough to know what he is saying to her, but he doesn't speak Russian at all. He has started picking some words up from hearing me talk to her all the time, but anyway it is a conversation between her and I, so he doesn't feel excluded 🤷🏼♀️ We had agreed we both want her to know both languages, so it was an inconvenience we were willing to accept. Maybe your husband will pick up on some Chinese!
I would be interested to know where you read that linguists have expanded the definition of bilingualism to fluency (& maybe literacy, which is reading & writing, not just speaking) in more than 2 languages, rather than multilingualism, and when they defined it as 2 or more being used in the home, rather than fluently, regularly by the individual accomplished in more than one language. Or is it just educators redefining this for mostly K-12 usage to understand the child's skill sets and home environment? I am educated in languages and language arts and am not familiar with this. The sounds and rhythms of languages differ significantly, so early learning is far preferable. Immersion learning is so important and formation of sounds made with the mouth. Your girls are lucky because Mandarin, English & Spanish are the most commonly used languages on earth, by native speakers and by others, as well. You are so right that learning another language will not delay educational development in children. Interestingly, I have a friend who was an immigrant as a child speaking only Spanish and was placed with a family speaking English only until his parents got settled into jobs and a new home. Talk about immersion learning. Anyway, he studied Romance languages in college and beyond because he loves them. However, he claims now, well into adulthood, that people assume he finds Spanish easiest to speak and he does not. One reason for this, as a language arts scholar, is that he did most of his higher learning from middle school onward in English, so many more complex or nuanced topics, subjects are easier for him in English since he didn't learn them in Spanish.
Thanks (as always) for your insightful thoughts! With regard to your question about the use of the term “bilingualism”, I learned this from the work of Eowyn Crisfield. (Edited to add: I think it’s more so intended as a synonymous usage - that bilingualism can ALSO refer to 3+ languages, and isn’t necessarily replacing the term “multilingualism”.)
Another amazing video Ashley ❤️
For those who are implementing one parent, one language, what do you do when your toddler brings you a book in the other language? Unfortunately, our English library by far exceeds our Mandarin library, and I’m not always able to translate the books (despite being a native speaker) in a way that’s satisfactory to me and my toddler.
We typically translate to the best of our abilities, but my husband struggles with translating some English stories into Korean since English is his second language. So sometimes he just tells a story that he makes up based on the pictures, and that becomes the "Korean" version. Isn't ideal though, because the vocabulary is definitely simpler. We have found some books on Amazon that already include a Korean and English translation-I wonder if there is something similar you could implement?
Any thoughts on virtual lessons with a private tutor for a three year old and a four year old when parents do not speak that target language? I would think that is considered person to person learning even though it is on a screen? Also any other tips for parents who do not speak the target language? Thank you!
I agree that it is more closely related to in person. It is not ideal, but far better than passively absorbing (or, actually, not really absorbing) from a show. Songs and audio books could also be a great supplement in your case!
This is so great, thanks! 💗💗💗💗
Thank you so much for posting this!
I am an Italian living in Germany with my husband, who is a Russian-speaking German, and our 22-months-old daughter. I exclusively speak Italian to her (as well as my parents, every day via video chat), while she learns German from her father, daycare and outside world. She also has exposure to some English, as it is the language my husband and I use to communicate, and Russian from her father's family. She started speaking relatively recently and still uses only one-word sentences. We see that she understands a lot of German and Italian but in speaking she always chooses the easiest word from those languages. So she would always use the Italian words for some animals and the German words for others, even though she knows and recognizes both.
We try to get appropriate books in all these languages but it's not always easy.
I have a very similar situation:) I'm Russian living in Germany with my Italian husband and our 21-month-old son. We chose OPOL approach and I speak exclusively Russian with our child, whereas my husband speaks Italian with him. Our son goes to the German-speaking daycare. With my husband we communicate in English. So, our son is exposed to four languages, though Russian & Italian are dominating. English is in a passive mode right now, and I'm asking myself, when and how to start introducing it without putting too much pressure on him and without major reduction of spoken time in other minority languages...
@@ekaterinakapitanova67 we are close to similar, but just 3 languages. Russian from me, Korean from dad, and English out in the world. I'm not worried about English tho because it is so much easier to pick up for kids and they tend to prefer it over something as complicated as Russian or Korean. So I don't plan on introducing it at all at home-her exposure in the world and then full immersion in the school will be plenty!
Our daughter(now almost 29 months old) is also picking out the easiest words although she knows the words in both languages. You really notice this when you ask her something 😊 She really started to use more words right around the age of 24 months. I used to be really insecure about her being so late with speaking until I talked to a speech therapist who said to me that the biggest speech jump for bilingual children will happen between 2 to 2,5 years old and she was absolutely right 😊. I really wished I had known this earlier (cause I couldn’t find that info anywhere) so that I wouldn’t have been so insecure about it. At the moment we get to hear a lot of new words and sometimes even sentences now 😊
First. This is very helpful.
I grew up in a bilingual home, but my dad was often absent and he didn't keep up speaking in his language with me and my sisters so in the end he gave up and we didn't learn it fluently, which is such a pity and such a big chunk of culture from his side that we have been missing because of it! Now I'm expecting my first child and we will need to balance between 4 different languages at our home, so we're still trying to figure out how exactly that will work but I'm determined to teach my native language (as we don't live there) because that is so important if I want them to learn and understand the culture.