I think the whole idea of being bilingual as a kid is fascinating. So I decided to start a thread about it.

Did you grow up speaking more than one language? Would your parents only talk to you in that language, and you learned your other language from school/TV, or how else did it work?

Sarah:

Due to my father’s work, I’ve lived in several countries.
I lived most of my life in spanish speaking countries.
But because of moving from country to country, I sudied in American Schools in those countries……therefore, I always studied in English.

During a part of my life, most of my friends were english speaking, though we lived in a spanish speaking country.

I was bilingual as a kid too =) The Philippines is a mostly bilingual country. I (naturally) spoke Tagalog with my family and friends, but I went to English schools my entire life. Not to mention that everything is almost always a mix of Tagalog and English in the Philippines (songs, movies, books, signs, conversations!) so I just learned both languages “natively.”

As for Spanish…. Tagalog is rich in Spanish words and when it comes to money, Filipinos count in Spanish. My mom also speaks a language/dialect called Visayan (which I understand perfectly, but cannot speak!) that has more Spanish words in it. Basically, if someone spoke Spanish to me, I won’t be able to understand much of it, but I can catch more words than someone who doesn’t know Visayan.

Interesting topic!
Same here actually…. bilingual as well. I grew up as a Greek in Germany, so at home I learned Greek through my parents, and German I started learning in the kindergarden and at school. Besides, there was English, too. So I guess that wasn’t a bad combination at all. :-)

Interesting indeed!

My dad was a mine engineer/boss and we lived in “prefab” towns where people spoke either English or French…. we probably had the first non-structured/non official immersion schools in the country…. we had the teachers we could get (nobody really wants to move up north where it’s cold and winter lasts 8 months/year – seemed like it anyways): some were anglophones, other were francophones…. for instance, my geography teacher was unlingual French and my math teacher was unilingual English…. so I grew up using both French and English…. :P Though we were speaking French at home….

I also find the idea of being bilingual so interesting! I was born in Belgium but my family and I moved to the United States when I was three, so while my native language is French, I grew up learning English as well. Even now I always speak French with my family, and I go back to Belgium and visit the rest of the family at least once a year. I learned English through school and friends and whatnot, and I have to say my English is much stronger than my French.

The funny thing is what happened with my sister, though. Since we both grew up learning both English and French, when we speak to each other now, we kind of blend the two together! Frenglish, or Franglais, or whatever you want to call it. Anyone else have this problem? haha

I do Delphine! je passe d’une langue à l’autre, et souvent s’en même m’en rendre compte! I guess it happens to you sometimes: you’re speaking in French and suddenly the next word or sentence comes to you in English…. alors ça fait un joli méli-mélo! :D

I speak spanglish with many of my friends!

@Enrique: OMG my spanish teacher gets soooooooo angry when we use that in class. “No spanglish in la classe de espanol. Spanglish es mal!” lol but we dont listen XD

@Sarah: I wasent a bilingual kid, but my cousins are in the begining stages of it(like getting interested, learning a few words from TV, etc.), and I think its really cool becuase they’ll use some of it with me when were alone or when im babysitting, and I think maybe someday they’ll be fluent……I think all kids should be bilingual, they say that it helps kids learn better in school and stuff, and its fun. :D

@Kay-Kay. Ok, it’s Inglañol instead of Spanglish….hehe

Great thread Sarah N!

This topic fascinates me too. My grandparents were Chinese and moved to Mauritius where my parents grew up. They emigrated to England which is where I was born. As a result I grew up speaking both English and Creole. The Creole dialect I speak is spoken by only about a million people since the island of Mauritius is pretty small. How useful is that you might ask yourself? Not very, if you live in the UK but it taught me that being able to speak two languages is really useful in situations when you are with people who are speak the same languages and you don’t want people around you to eavesdrop. Since I have taught ESL in Thailand for 10 years I am now trilingual. This makes life more fun because you can play pranks on people and know when people are gossipping about you!

When I began elementary school, I was living in El Paso, Texas and had a Mexican teacher. A few of my classmates could only speak Spanish, and so I often heard her talking to them in Spanish and teaching them English. . . I’ve since forgotten most of my Spanish, even after studying it again in highschool, but when I was a little girl, I understood it reasonably well, and when the school year ended, my parents claim that for the first weeks of summer I used a lot of Spanish words/sentences. I find it a little funny, really, because my mother AVOIDED raising me bilingual/trilingual (she speaks five languages fluently) for fear that I would do poorly in school!

I’m from Idaho and the chances for bilingualism are pretty small but my wife is Brazilian and our son is growing up bilingual. It is fascinating for me to watch how he learns words from both languages and uses them as if they were the same language. He is still pretty young so I’m excited to see what else he can teach me

Englog (Filipino/English)
Europanto (English/French/German)
Finglish (Finnish/English)
Franglais (French English)
Germish (German/English)
Hinglish (Hindi/English)
Konglish (Korean/English)
Madras bashai (Tamil/English)
Manglish (Malay/English)
Nuyorican (Spanglish as spoken by Puerto Ricans in New York City)
Runglish (Russian/English)
Swenglish (Swedish/English)
Taglish (Filipino/English)
Thailish (Thai/English)
Vinish (Vietnamese/English)
Yanito (Spanglish as spoken in Gibraltar)
Yeshivish (Yinglish as spoken by Yeshiva students)
Chinglish (Chinese/English)
Dunglish (Dutch English)
Engrish (Japanese English)

My parents are Chinese and I was born in Malaysia, it’s a multi-racial country so I grew up learning Malay (our national language) and English. Does Chinese counts as a language? Because I could only speak in Chinese, can’t write :( . I do speak a little of Mandarin Chinese and Hokkien, if that is counted as language :)

Now I raise my daughter bilingual. I am from Japan and now living in the U.S. My daughter was born and has been growing up in the U.S.

When we lived in San Francisco, we met many Japanese parents who raised their children bilingual. Many of them advised us to talk only in Japanese to our child; otherwise she would lose her Japanese eventually after she would go to school. Since then we have excessively talked in Japanese between us.

Now we live in Colorado and we see much fewer Japanese people around here. My daughter is almost 4yr. She speaks Japanese very well, but she is behind in English. People here in Colorado think it is a problem that she doesn’t speak enough English at her age. They advise me teach her English. I don’t think it is right. But sometimes I feel sorry when she seems to have hard time to get a friend due to lack of her English.

I would like to hear from if you have ever had difficulties as bilingual and how you overcome them.

I wasn’t raised bilingual, but I plan to raise my children bilingual (german/english), fortunately we have got schools around here which are specialized for that.

What i believe is the most difficult thing about raising your kids bilingual, is to find the right balance. With german/english its maybe not as hard as it is for japanese/english. Usually, thats what i have been told by parents who raised their children bilingual, kids learn the local language very quickly when they get into the kindergarten. They just ensured that their nursery teacher is aware of that and can handle it.

Overall i believe raising bilingual is quite important, you give your child a better understanding/feeling for language.

@ Fumiyo Y : it’s possible to raised bilingual kids, I mean I’m bilingual. I think what your daughter needs is more exposure to English, listen and watch more English news and music and eventually she will pick up from there and she will be as good as a native speaker and she’s only 4, you’ll be suprised how much she improve. Don’t worry more exposure to the language. Hope I help a little

well, i am from India. And we have over 30 languages that are widely spoken. So my parents speak Oriya (language 1), most movies and TV was in Hindi (language 2), stayed in Kolkota where the local language is Bangla (language 3) and studied in a school where the medium of instruction was English(language 4) ….lol :) guess that explains why most Indians have an easy time learning a new language :)

Most Indian would know at least 3 languages – Hindi, English and their mother tongue/ local language:)

@Rene, I agree with you. To learn a language is to learn the culture. I want her to have a broad view on diverse cultures.
@Jeremy, Thank you. I can’t wait to see her speak both English and Japanese like native speakers.

Fumiyo, I live in Canada in an area where there are lots of bilingual children and families. The main language here is English and many people are trying to retain their French-speaking heritage and transmit it to their children. The general consensus here (and I agree) is that you have to speak French all the time at home — French is learned, English is caught, or so they say — and the kids will just pick up English eventually. I have yet to see a case where that didn’t happen. Actually, the problem is the reverse — so many kids are bilingual and English is so prevalent that even though they learned French first, their English is eventually better. My family is in a slightly different situation in that I grew up in a completely French environment; my wife is English-speaking and we speak our respective languages to our kids. We both learned eachother’s language too, though.

Perhaps you need to expose your daughter to English speaking children more often. But I don’t think it’s a reason to worry. As Kamal said, in monolingual environments, people are afraid of exposing children to several languages and are alarmed when the child is slightly behind in one of them, whereas it’s very common around the world for children to learn 2 or 3 languages as they grow up. Don’t let yourself be intimidated by other people’s ignorance ;)

Alex, Now I am confident of my educational policy. Thanks!

I would like to raise any kids I have on Russian and Finnish with some English.

I was bilingual child and I think this was good and I’m raising my kids the same,they talk arabic of course as a native language and lots of English words also so little french words like merci or bon nuit besides that my kids study english at school and at play school

I am Italian and my husband is English, here in Italy is very hard to teach English to your children, because the films are all dubbed and the English taught at school is not very good. But we try to speak as much English as possbile at home. And both the children can speak fluent Italian and English (with a bit of an Italian accent of course!!)