Languages and Kids

I thought I posed this but I guess I never did, so gonna post it now. Goes to show my silly memory.

Both my girlfriend and I speak French and English as our main languages. Generally at home we speak mostly English as we live in a mainly English-speaking city, but sometimes for chatter we speak in French.

We're going to be moving to a province that is a majority of French speakers, although the area we'd be moving to would be pretty Anglo (English-speaking). I've talked to a few really good friend with job connections, and I'd probably be working for a French company.

We want the kids so grow up bilingual (with French/English), but they are very young right now, so would it be best only speaking one language while around them? I grew up learning French in an English-speaking country while exposed to plenty of English, and I managed to pick up both languages, and my girlfriend was different from me- she grew up learning English in an English-speaking country, and later learned French from scratch.

I don't want to confuse our kids so I'm not sure if speaking both languages around them is good or bad, or if it is important while they're this young.

On a side note... little Torin and Evan are so cuuuuute!

It's actually much easier for children to learn multiple languages while they are very, very young. Children in pre-school and kindergarten who speak only Spanish learn to speak English very quickly...they are often fluent by the end of the school year. Children in higher grades (but still early elementary) have a much harder time learning English. It is not unusual to see a family who only speaks Spanish at home that has a 6 year-old that is bilingual, a 10 year-old that is struggling, and a 12 year-old who can't speak English at all.

I say speak both languages to them as often as you can. Maybe even say something in English, then immediately repeat it in French...ask them to try to respond in the same way. You could even make it a game.

I don't know how the school systems are in Canada, but in my town the children at a very young age have to take spanish. I have an eleven year old who's been taking spanish since the first grade.

Most children shows are english and spanish. As a result my younger children (4 and 3) speak spanglish. I don't know if it's normal for the younger kids to mix the languages or not but mine do.

I and my husband speak english but I can pick up some spanish words and understand what they are saying (do to the childrens tv programs).

So if you speak both languages and the children are going to have to learn it in school, I would say expose them to both languages as much as possible. Just watch out for the mixing.

Sorry for rambling!

I don't speak Spanish fluently but when I was in school, they started our weekly Spanish lessons in kindergarden, it made high school spanish easy and better foundation for the ability to learn Spanish fluently. So teaching another langauge at a young age is important, I wish my school had been better about the Spanish thing, if they had I could probably speak it fluently instead of having to learn how to do that in college.

I would say as the others to talk in both, I don't think it will confuse them, I have friends who are bilingual and their parents spoke English and the other language around them since birth, never confused them they realized that one language was for home and the other for school.
Starting the learning of a launguage should start young, the older the twins get the harder it will be for them to learn it.

Good luck and best wishes
Silver

id use both vince. i tried to learn french from yr 7 (about 11) and yeah. you know i suck lol.
from my experience, the younger they are the easier it is to understand another language. a friend of mine sofia's first language is swedish, (yay sweden lol) and she came to england and learnt english from the age of about 7. she picked it up real well.
theres also something to do with the whole... sounds thing. diff languages use diff sounds to make the letters and words. after about 8 yrs old, its very hard for a kid to pick up new ones. but its easy for anyone under.
if they learn french sounds as well as english, it will be easier for them to learn french.
so yeah

Yeah I agree.
When my brother and i were really young our parents used to speak both English and Dutch to us. They stopped talking English to us when I went to school so I must have been about 4 and my brother about 2. But when I picked it up again when I was 11 I had no problems dusting my English of to somewhere near fluent. (though u would laugh at my attempts to speak it probably, lol) My brother is pretty good at English as well.

When your kids are young they will prob mix them up and produce half english half french sentences, but when they get older that will get better too.
Every study shows, the younger you start learning, the easier it is to pick it up.

There are sometimes votes to start teaching kids english and dutch at school from age 4 and possibly also another language like french or spanish. Though i don't think that will happen lol, as the teacher would claim its hard enough to learn them proper Dutch, let alone 2 or 3 languages at the same time... Also the teachers would have to be perfect in these languages too --> if you teach it to the kids wrong it will be near impossible to fix it later on. Esp the pronouncing, that is.

Either way if you talk both English and French from the start it will work out fine I'm sure!