Hallo from a Malaysian Mama in Germany

Also, don't be afraid of not knowing words. Look them up for next time. I go to wikipedia for translation on a regular basis, because I frankly don't know how to say a prairie dog in Russian. It actually models the behavior you want your children to have, because they all will face the exact same issue of limited vocabulary. I have a 10 year old, and now she's quite handy with the dictionary.

Welcome Rachel!

Tatyana has already said everything that came up to me as I read your post!

A language is something that needs to be worked on throughout your life. Even your mother tongue, there is always something to learn. I was raised abroad in a British school and I am now raising my 2 girls as a non-native mum, 15 years after having returned to my home country. Though I am very confident speaking English, I realised that my memory needed some serious refreshing and that I also needed to learn more vocabulary more infant-related. It has been 7 years now since our eldest daughter was born, and I feel like I have learned so much more...and I still do. In our home, everything is in either of our 2 minority languages (telly, books, radio, etc...), so there is always an opportunity for all of us to learn. And when we don't, we ask, search on the internet or in a dictionary (I'm also initiating my eldest to it's use).


As to raising a bilingual and biliterate child, it is up to you. Personally, we chose to. It has not always been easy (especially as we're a trilingual family, hence 3 times more to learn), but I think it is a shame not to provide that little extra advantage. Plus, as he grows, your child might react like my eldest, and express curiosity in learning to read in his other languages.

And remember, your Cantonese does not have to be perfect for you to pass it on (whether just oral or also literacy skills). It is better to have an imperfect minority language than no minority language at all!

Hi Rachel,

I'm a native Spanish speaker, currently living in the US, where I'm doing my very best to raise my daughter multilingual. Long time ago, when I was young and pretty , I studied German for 7 years (I began studying English in school when I was about 11 years old, then I majored in English in college, and now I live in the US). I'd say my English competency is near-native, but my German competency is, on its best days, that of an advanced beginning learner. Before my daughter was born, the last time I ever studied any German was when I was 21: fast-forward 20-something years, and here I am, doing my very best to teach German, a language I'm not proficient at, to my daughter.

Each child is different, and what might work for one might not be so successful for another, but in my case, my daughter has experienced zero confusion when I talk to her in two languages (I'm the only parent she has, so all the ml input she receives comes from me). English is not spoken in my household at all, just minority languages (I'm also trying to make her acquainted with French, a language that I don't speak at all). Every day I read to my daughter both in Spanish and in German. While the majority of our speaking time is in Spanish, I make an effort to speak the little German that I know with her. We read together, we watch cartoons, we listen to music in German and in Spanish; she'll be 4 in March, and I can tell you that Spanish is definitely her dominant language, but she does a pretty good job (based on the input she receives) with German, using it in sentences, and even being 'creative' with the language (by that I mean that she tries to express herself in German, so she makes new, basic sentences such as "she reads a book," "it's her birthday," "mom, can you please help me?,"look, the crazy monkey is climbing the tree" or "a lion can't fly, that's crazy!" ("crazy" is her favorite word in German, ha, ha). She's even saying short, very basic sentences in French such as "I like red," "that's a small fish" or "see you later!"

I'm a linguist by training, so I've studied language development in bilingual kids (not my specialty, but I have a good basic knowledge). We have a tendency to think of 'confusion' when it comes to kids learning more than one language at once, and I don't think it's truly a matter of being 'confused' in the most basic, well-known meaning of the word, just taking some time to figure things out and make sense out of what you're saying. However, I also have to admit that even with my linguistics background, when I became a mother, the fear of 'I might be confusing my child' was present. It turned out, I was the only 'confused' one, thinking I might not be doing the right thing: my daughter had no problem whatsoever. She never uses English with me, just her minority languages, and even when my initial fear was that by teaching her German/French I'd have to devote less time to Spanish (less input, since the same exposure time would have to be divided into several languages), it hasn't made a difference whatsoever. At this time, her Spanish is very similar to the Spanish of monolingual children her age, she seems to understand pretty well that we speak several languages, and she's more than fine with that. Sometimes I think it's going to be a shock for her when she realizes other kids only speak one language in their households!

My goal is also literacy in her minority languages. Because of her age, I haven't even tried to teach her reading in any language, although I'm making sure she gets exposed to how the alphabet is pronounced in every language. She spells words in Spanish pretty well, and she's pretty good at doing the same thing in German as well. Not really sure how I'll approach the "reading/writing episodes," but I'll do my very best when that moment comes. For the time being, I've gathered materials to begin with reading and writing both in Spanish and German, and when she's a little bit older, we'll begin with that. We'll see how that goes!