Step by step towards balanced bilingualism
Jun 21, 2017 7:11:14 GMT 9
Post by David on Jun 21, 2017 7:11:14 GMT 9
Hi everyone, so this is our track-your-progress thread, I plan to document our progress over the coming months and years. Our introduction is available here bilingualzoo.com/thread/777/szevasztok-hungary-hallo-germany -- just some bullet points about us:
- Dad ML German; ml English.
- Mom ML Hungarian; ml English
- Dad/Mom speak English together for 12+ years
- Two little ones: 2y4m girl, 0y1m boy
- our goal is to achieve full "native level" bilingualism in Hungarian/German for our kids
- like Adam, I enjoy the luxury of working from home, so I am close to the family all throughout the day although I have to work and carefully schedule my work time vs. family time
- we will have the chance to use a bilingual kindergarten and school so that should help long-term
Some of my fears and frustration have been outlined in our introductory thread. Basically our daughter started to speak less and less of the ml (German) while converging towards 100% ML (Hungarian) over the last 4 months. Her passive knowledge is good, she understands what I say. Just she completely stopped using German in her own speaking. I have done some reading, and apparently this is not that uncommon during the 2-3 year age mark considering that the ml exposure has (due to my lack of consistency) been way below 20 hours per week, closer to 6-8 hours per week.
Adam uses the term "you have to hit the ground running" if you want to reach bilingualism, and boy was he right. I underestimated how hard it is to remain consistent, keeping the exposure constant day in day out. However, enough crying and whining from me -- we have taken some steps and made some changes in the last few weeks and I believe it's showing some results:
- I have tracked the time spent per week and have become more consistent, generating about 11-13 hours per week over the last month or so. The tracking really helped me understand a) where we are at exposure-wise b) what I can reasonably do to get more quality hours in, e.g. we booked a weekly toddler swimming class that is a lot of fun for me and our daughter. That's a good two hours of extra German exposure per week and it doesn't feel like a chore at all for either of us, her eyes light up when I tell her each Saturday morning "Are you ready for a swim?".
- Using Amazon Unlimited I have recently added lots of German picture ebooks to our ereader and read daily now. I know Adam drove the point home just how important reading aloud is in his book, though I remained a bit skeptical if our little one has the necessary attention span -- my feeling so far was that she can't concentrate longer than a minute or two when going through a picture book and sometimes went into a bit of a meltdown when I kept on reading to her. I thought it just doesn't work for her. But after four weeks of daily practice I am happy to say we now can go to about 5 minutes before she needs a break. I'm so happy! It appears it's a matter of getting her used to reading (after seeing too many cartoons which I believe unfortunately lessen the appeal of reading picture books) so I am hopeful over time I can get her to listen to longer and longer stories over time. To any parents who have trouble getting their toddler to listen: don't give up, I've been there!
- I mentioned it before, but we only let her watch German language cartoons. About 45 mins a day, when she asks for it. I know its not the best input for toddlers quality-wise but I'm happy its German at least and it works. I noticed she added a number of words such as animals or food words to her passive German vocabulary.
- We now have a German speaking nanny while in Hungary, she adds about 6-8 hours of ml exposure per week so we're getting closer to the 20 hours per week range
I have read a ton of material/studies/papers and books (half-way through Adam's as well) and soaking up the information has calmed me down a lot. I was in a bit of a panic mode 6 weeks ago or so, thinking I will never hear a single German word from her mouth again
-- I feel quite confident and empowered now and feel I "know what to do" -- from everything I have read, as long as I keep up the exposure things should get much better around age 3-4, plus at 3.5 her kindergarten will start which should be a big help. And as Adam said in the book: it's completely irrelevant what mistakes I potentially made in the past, it useless to try to mentally go back in time -- I wish I read aloud to her when she was 6 months old but all I can do is read aloud to her *NOW* and that's still helping a lot. The future is ahead and that's what we can influence now.
Just this last week our daughter now started to:
- partially count in German (and not only in Hungarian), e.g. she would now sometimes mix up German and Hungarian numbers whereas 6 weeks ago it was 100% Hungarian only. So nice to hear!
- When asking her two days ago if she wants a pancake her reply was "ja igen" (German and Hungarian mix in the same sentence) instead of the usual "Igen" (Hungarian). Great!
Of course these are baby steps but I just feel the persistence is starting to pay off.
We're travelling back to Germany (from Hungary) in about 4 weeks and will stay there for 8 weeks. I will report back from there with hopefully some more tiny success stories. Thanks for reading!
- Dad ML German; ml English.
- Mom ML Hungarian; ml English
- Dad/Mom speak English together for 12+ years
- Two little ones: 2y4m girl, 0y1m boy
- our goal is to achieve full "native level" bilingualism in Hungarian/German for our kids
- like Adam, I enjoy the luxury of working from home, so I am close to the family all throughout the day although I have to work and carefully schedule my work time vs. family time
- we will have the chance to use a bilingual kindergarten and school so that should help long-term
Some of my fears and frustration have been outlined in our introductory thread. Basically our daughter started to speak less and less of the ml (German) while converging towards 100% ML (Hungarian) over the last 4 months. Her passive knowledge is good, she understands what I say. Just she completely stopped using German in her own speaking. I have done some reading, and apparently this is not that uncommon during the 2-3 year age mark considering that the ml exposure has (due to my lack of consistency) been way below 20 hours per week, closer to 6-8 hours per week.
Adam uses the term "you have to hit the ground running" if you want to reach bilingualism, and boy was he right. I underestimated how hard it is to remain consistent, keeping the exposure constant day in day out. However, enough crying and whining from me -- we have taken some steps and made some changes in the last few weeks and I believe it's showing some results:
- I have tracked the time spent per week and have become more consistent, generating about 11-13 hours per week over the last month or so. The tracking really helped me understand a) where we are at exposure-wise b) what I can reasonably do to get more quality hours in, e.g. we booked a weekly toddler swimming class that is a lot of fun for me and our daughter. That's a good two hours of extra German exposure per week and it doesn't feel like a chore at all for either of us, her eyes light up when I tell her each Saturday morning "Are you ready for a swim?".
- Using Amazon Unlimited I have recently added lots of German picture ebooks to our ereader and read daily now. I know Adam drove the point home just how important reading aloud is in his book, though I remained a bit skeptical if our little one has the necessary attention span -- my feeling so far was that she can't concentrate longer than a minute or two when going through a picture book and sometimes went into a bit of a meltdown when I kept on reading to her. I thought it just doesn't work for her. But after four weeks of daily practice I am happy to say we now can go to about 5 minutes before she needs a break. I'm so happy! It appears it's a matter of getting her used to reading (after seeing too many cartoons which I believe unfortunately lessen the appeal of reading picture books) so I am hopeful over time I can get her to listen to longer and longer stories over time. To any parents who have trouble getting their toddler to listen: don't give up, I've been there!
- I mentioned it before, but we only let her watch German language cartoons. About 45 mins a day, when she asks for it. I know its not the best input for toddlers quality-wise but I'm happy its German at least and it works. I noticed she added a number of words such as animals or food words to her passive German vocabulary.
- We now have a German speaking nanny while in Hungary, she adds about 6-8 hours of ml exposure per week so we're getting closer to the 20 hours per week range
I have read a ton of material/studies/papers and books (half-way through Adam's as well) and soaking up the information has calmed me down a lot. I was in a bit of a panic mode 6 weeks ago or so, thinking I will never hear a single German word from her mouth again
-- I feel quite confident and empowered now and feel I "know what to do" -- from everything I have read, as long as I keep up the exposure things should get much better around age 3-4, plus at 3.5 her kindergarten will start which should be a big help. And as Adam said in the book: it's completely irrelevant what mistakes I potentially made in the past, it useless to try to mentally go back in time -- I wish I read aloud to her when she was 6 months old but all I can do is read aloud to her *NOW* and that's still helping a lot. The future is ahead and that's what we can influence now.Just this last week our daughter now started to:
- partially count in German (and not only in Hungarian), e.g. she would now sometimes mix up German and Hungarian numbers whereas 6 weeks ago it was 100% Hungarian only. So nice to hear!
- When asking her two days ago if she wants a pancake her reply was "ja igen" (German and Hungarian mix in the same sentence) instead of the usual "Igen" (Hungarian). Great!
Of course these are baby steps but I just feel the persistence is starting to pay off.
We're travelling back to Germany (from Hungary) in about 4 weeks and will stay there for 8 weeks. I will report back from there with hopefully some more tiny success stories. Thanks for reading!
). Your point about physical books over ebooks is well understood by me now and I wholeheartedly agree. I can't repeat enough how important the reading aloud bit is. (And Adam has done that so adamantly on the site but I simply didn't believe how important it really is.) I haven't measured our average daily story reading time, but me and my wife strive to hit about 30 minutes per day now, distributed throughout the day. That seems to be her attention limit at the moment.
) books for you to read. Yes, it's a lovely indication of how she has grown so fond of the read-aloud experience with her father and her father's language. (I'm reminded of my son at around the same age, and when I would come home from work--when I was working outside the home--he would grab a book and run to me at the door, squealing "Read this!" But one time he had trouble picking up a heavy book and so, in a small panic, he quickly grabbed a sock off the floor and ran to me with that instead, holding it out just like a book but with a confused little expression on his face.)
