sevtroi in booju_mooju

Raising a Bilingual child?

Mar 07, 2010 13:48

Is it okay to raise a child bi-lingual if your partner can't speak the other language?

I think its something that would be beneficial to the child, but also fear that it could become a block where one's partner feels left out.

Thoughts?

Comments (46)

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alicia_beth

Why can't the partner learn to speak it?

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coinin

Some people have an especially hard time learning and speaking new languages, especially if the native language and the new one are incredibly different from each other and the person in question is an adult.

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alicia_beth

I'd say have them attempt to learn it at least, they could probably pick up some of it eventually I'd think.

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weeweekittie

Since the bi-lingual parent isn't going to be teaching the baby very complex phrases right from the get-go, maybe it will be at a level easy enough for the other partner to learn along with them and pick it up over time. Even if their partner can never reach a fully conversational level along with their child, they should hopefully get the basics of it enough to follow a conversation so they wouldn't feel left out!
Personally, if my husband or his family were bilingual, I would have started (or at least tried!) learning their language before having a baby, but that's just me. :)

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Thread (9)

usnbfs

The partner could start learning the language? If my partner didn't speak my mother tongue and didn't show any interest in learning it, that would be a problem for me.

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elephantsrock

I say:
See if you can get your partner to learn some the language! Since you are teaching the kid you,can teach the partner at the same time!

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castros

I don't see a problem with that.

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digipatty

Even if the partner can't/won't learn to speak it, raising a bi-lingual child is more than okay! As a teenager who grew up bilingual all I can say is that speaking other languages has helped me in ways that I probably don't even realize. Language is a link to another culture, and with children there's a time window before they lose a certain ability to learn languages. While both my parents speak Spanish and I spent the first years of my life in a spanish-speaking country, I know that even if a future hypothetical partner didn't speak Spanish, I would do everything I could to teach my child spanish as well. Closer to your dilemma--I know someone who is a Spanish teacher (he's not a native Spanish speaker) but he's been speaking Spanish to his son since birth (as far as I know his mother doesn't speak Spanish)--I don't pretend to know their whole life story, but I have a feeling that if it had created problems he wouldn't have kept doing it for five years.

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ginny_toxic

From what I've heard, having one parent speak one language and the other parent speak another language is the easiest way to get a child to learn two languages.

My middle school foreign language teacher told us about how he did that with his kids, and then when they got a little older, tried to teach HIM english. (even though they've heard him speak english on the phone and with other people, he only spoke spanish to the kids)

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sevtroi in booju_mooju

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