Bi-lingual children

I know a couple, the dad is english and the mother from Prague.They have a 2 year old and a baby.
The 2 year old doesnt talk much(no idea if that i normal for a 2 year old!)I get the impression he understands/responds more to the mothers language, I assume as they spend more time together.But in general he is responsive to both languages.
I think its great to teach kids languages.Itl give them a headstart in this ever expanding world and can create job opportunities when older.

I (like many other Indians) was raised to be bi-lingual and proceeded to become multi-lingual as I grew older.

My first few words were in my mother tongue. My mom(whose english is pretty limited) spoke to me in my mother tongue. And my dad spoke to me in both my mother tongue and in english. And then in school, I was taught in English. By the time I was 2, I spoke a bit of both languages...

In your case, I think you should encourage your wife to speak to the child in Thai and Lao - and a little bit of English. While you and the school can communicate in English.

Hope that helps!!

Definitely! Children learn languages fairly easy and it is such an
enrichment for them to be multilingual. My daughter has only spoken
English for the first 4 years, and then slowly got introduced to German
and Spanish in school. Today she's 10 and speaks German and Spanish
fairly well, aside from English of course. We might add French in the
near future.

From an educator-in-training I am glad you have decided to try for bilingualism. Knowing 2 languages is a good thing, and will help any child learn more when the time comes. I think that some bilingual kids may get a slower start in speaking, but I think that those kids catch up before starting school and in the early years of school. I agree with Sakhi about the combo of languages and then when the little ones start school, perhaps Nee can speak mostly Thai to the kids at home.

That's pretty much the idea I had. I'd also like them to learn to read and write it. I'll have to do some more research about that.

The first step to literacy is a good foundation in oral language. There are books written in Thai, stock you house with them and read from them as the children grow up. Have Nee write notes to them in Thai. Eventually, they can write to their family in Thailand.

Yep. Good advice so far.

I think that bilingual children have early language gains that then level off -- I know that's true of ASL (American Sign Language)/ English bilingualism, can't remember if it's true of other spoken languages.

What we did is pretty much what sakhi says -- I used ASL a lot in talking to the baby sozlet, her dad talked to her more (English), she became fluent in ASL first then English later.

I agree it's a nice idea on a few levels -- to give any children that connection to Nee's family and Nee herself even if she becomes fluent in English, as well as the advantages of knowing more than one language (and how better to learn than from a native speaker in one's own household?)

Can't add much to what's been said. All good advice. Kids pick up languages quite easily and hardly ever get confused or mix up two or more languages. It's only later on, when they've gotten used to just the one language, that picking up another one becomes a problem. I would suggest that in the home Nee speak only (or, at least, primarily) Thai to them. They'll pick up English quite naturally outside the home where it is the language they'll mostly hear.

I grew up in a home where Latvian was the most commonly spoken language. As a refugee in Germany, from age six to age eleven, I heard enough German on the street to become reasonably fluent (for an eight-year old, that is; I still have the German vocabulary of an eight-year old ). When we came to the USA, I was 11 and still had no difficulty in mastering English (and, all false modesty aside, I do mean 'mastering'.)

The girl gang that Mo hangs out with (aka the shehooligans) include one that speaks Chinese, two that speak Vietnamese, and one that speaks Spanish. All of these kids speak English on the street and their native tongue at home.

Mo has picked up some cool sayings and expressions from these families. His pronunciation and intonation are pitch perfect - he gets mad at me if I can't say it correctly.

Interestingly, since our return from Texas he has taken to occassionally speaking with a drawl too.

(Meryl Streep move over.)

I could kick myself for not having learned another language.

Marcador.

I'm trying to learn Thai now. It is very difficult. But since my none of my inlaws speak English, and any children we may be blessed with will be speaking Thai, I don't want to be left out. I'm slowly getting used to the sentence structure, but I think developing a sufficient vocabulary will be the hardest part. I must be getting the tones right, because when I've tried it on Nee on the phone, she's been very impressed.

I'd like to learn ASL. I've been interested in that for a long time.

Are you sure this is a bad thing? (I tried to pretend I wasn't bilingual for as long as I could...)

It seems like a great cultural advantage (as well as a travel/work advantage) to speak more than one language.

I'm no way bilingual (native British) but my German is now of a standard that I can talk on most topics relatively fluently and I'm hindered only when the language gets very specific/technical. I find that a huge advantage.

One insight from me is that friends who now live in Madrid (Italian father, American mother) are trying to have their son speak 3 languages (Italian, English and Spanish- from the nanny) and his speech development at 28 months when I last saw them was delayed in comparison with monolingual children of the same age.

That doesn't mean he can't understand but that he hasn't yet sorted out which words to use. I think this can cause him some psychological frustration with his inability to communicate and there was a lot of non-verbal "tantrum" behaviour which, visiting for the weekend, I found very hard to deal with. His parents clearly had the longer term effect of this which they found very disturbing and were doing lots of "soul searching" about what was right for him.

I'm not saying this is certainly a consequence of the attempts to have him learn multiple languages, merely that there may be a causal link and the disadvantages should be weighed with the advantages in each case.

KP

We primarily use Spanish in the house to speak to our 18 month old daughter. It helps that everyone in the family speaks Spanish.

She currently understands man simple questions and commands in Spanish -- like "do you want to read" or "shut the door".

She has a very small vocabulary of nouns that are mostly Spanish (i.e. "Gato") with a few English words thrown in (her favorite TV character is the very English "Bee Bir" from Sesame street).

She gets plenty of exposure to English from the TV or even from us, but we almost always address her in Spanish. I think that by making a primary language and a secondary language, it is a little less confusing. We figure we should focus on Spanish first since in the US, getting exposure to English later is no problem.

I have extended family, nieces and nephews, who handled this setup just fine and are now perfectly bilingual. The conventional wisdom is that kids raised with two language are generally a bit slower to speak but catch up very quickly.

Other people recommend having each parent speak their native language (Mommy speaks Thai and Daddy speaks English), but I have no direct knowledge of how this works.

My brother is big on "Baby Signs". We tried a bilingual version of this with our daughter, but she didn't take a liking to them. She has her own way of communicating that seems to suit her just fine.

My belief with these things is that with consistancy, patience and love-- any way of obtaining language will work. Sometimes we worry too much about which parenting "techniques" are best and forget that having caring involved parents is much more important than any of these minor details.

Along the same lines as what ebrown says, I think kids will speak the language that you speak to each other, unless they spend more time with one parent or the other. It's something we struggle with. We want our kids to be bilingual, but we speak english to each other because it's the language we have in common. My kids have a few words in dad's native language, but they are not bilingual. I think if I learned dad's language and we spoke to each other in it often, they would learn faster.

So study hard on that Thai!

We have friends where Mom's first language is French and Dad's English. Both children are fluently bilingual. The only difference is that the oldest child has a heavy French accent when speaking English. They were told it was because his Mom tried to speak to him in English even though her command of the language wasn't great. With the younger child Mom spoke French and Dad spoke English. The younger child is fluent and accentless in both languages.

I have two pieces of experience with bilingual children. The first is my own experience when my German parents brought me to Davis, California, when I was three. I already spoke German then. My parents immediately put me into a regular American kindergarten. At first, according to my mother, I threw a couple of fits. But within three weeks, my English improved enough to make myself understood, and after three months, I was so fluent American parents didn't even notice my accent anymore. That was over 30 years ago, and I have picked up a slight German accent in the meantime.

The second piece of experience comes from my two cousins, who were raised by their German mother and their Spanish father in Spain. Their language development was a couple of months behind their monolingual peers. (Of course, it's a two-piece sample, so we don't know if the bilingualism caused the delay.) But after that, they were perfectly fluent in both languages. My aunt and her husband made a point of having a strict "One parent, one language" policy. Although my aunt speaks fluently Spanish, she spoke to her children in German only. Likewise, her husband spoke Spanish only. My aunt had read in some parenting advice book that this kind of consistency is important so that children don't mingle up the languages.

There is little I can say about literacy. Because I left America before I went to school, my schooling was entirely German, so I learned English as a second language like everybody else in school. My cousins benefited from the German policy of operating running some German schools abroad, one of which they attended. I'm not sure if Thailand does that too. If not, maybe a private teacher would be an option for you? It's the only alternative that comes to my mind.

I speak english and strinemate, anna bitter seppo swell