Raising bilingual kids....

[heo luoi 206]

TLDR: what has been your approaches to raising fluent bilingual kids?

I know I may be jumping the gun here....but my fiance and I would like to try to, god/Darwin willing, start a family as soon as possible.

I dont want to ostracize my kid(s) and confuse them....but I do want them to be bilingual and more fluent that I ever was/am.

I grew up Bilingual..ish. My mother kinda 1/2 1/2 it, and father mostly spoke english at home. I rarely really used it except in response to getting yelled at by my parents. I was the type that just always thought I sounded dumb when I spoke and knew it wasn't right and seem to be tone deaf trying to speak/hear a tonal language. I have since self retaught myself and even learned some basic level of literacy. I even purely communicate with my fiance as such.

My parents didnt really seem to try that much w/ me as the baby at that point....

Upon retrospect they didnt really teach / explain very well it was a lot of just listen to me cause i'm your mom / dad type stuff...which isn't the best way I learn/respond

I know one friend where they only speak french 100% at home. I'm not really qualified to teach my kid his mother's language since I dont pronounce or truly read the tones/phonetics properly. I just get by. Just curious how hard it is for kids to get dual taught and bombarding them w/ massive vocabularies / syntax and exceptions to all the rules...etc.

In the States plenty of games/sites/shows/media....etc and of course school to learn English, but worried about finding those types/levels of things for my fiance to leverage to help teach Viet. It was hard for me growing up to keep with it and also not having a lot of peers to talk to (unfortunately I dont really know too many other viet speakers in the area either :/)

I know plenty of other people are bilingual so curious to how those approaches work(ed)?

Edited October 25, 2015 by heo luoi

[Maria4Garrett 5]

I speak English , Japanese and Filipino. I can read and write Kanji. So as my son. It's not a big deal for kids to adapt different languages and dialects . I'm 4 months preggy now. My husband and I plan to raise same way as my eldest

[SweetJuls 69]

I met a couple here in Italy, he is English, she is Greek. Their kids speak in English with him, Greek with her and in Italian with other people. It's three of them. No confusion at all, trust me.

It was amazing.

So they did was to speak their own language with them like: with the mother they only speek in Greek and with the father in English, and of course at school in Italian.