Although I mention parents specifically in the title, this isn’t just for parents to respond.
My wife and I are trying to raise our child to be bilingual (English and Portuguese). Currently we’re both speaking a bit of both to our child and when they eventually go to school we’ll speak more Portuguese as they’ll be exposed to English everywhere else.
Is this a good approach or is there something we can do better?
I have a little bit of experience in this. Brazilian living in Quebec. So, my friends almost always spoke in Portuguese with their children, school and TV were in French. After some time, school starts also to teach English and they chose the language of the TV. Now the kids are almost always speaking in English, although the are fluent in Portuguese and, of course, French.
Now, my wife and I hated the TV in French, so we kept it in English. So, my kids had to deal with three languages from the start. They mixed everything up and we screwed up by saying words in all three languages. We speak mainly Portuguese but we would use words that they learned in other languages in those languages instead of in Portuguese. In the end, my kids mix all three languages in a single sentence, which is weird as hell. They’re slowly separating the languages and we too. Now, every sentence we speak is in a single language. Their friends help in a way, because they also speak French in class but English outside (and Quebec’s government hates that).
So, if both of you are Portuguese speakers, I’d only speak Portuguese with them and let the TV and school teach English. They’ll know how to keep things separated.
Thank you for your insights! I’m not a native (Brazilian) Portuguese speaker but I’m fluent.
I’m not familiar with how the Quebec government works so that sentence made me curious. Why does the govt. hate that?
They try everything so people keep speaking in French. They force kids to go to French schools and reduced the places in English schools. They’ve had teachers and monitors forcing kids to speak in French even during recess. Of course it doesn’t work and kids will speak in whatever language they want, mainly English.
It’s interesting to hear the steps taken to achieve their goals, but I was more curious about why those are their goals in the first place. Why does the govt. want to force a language on the people when they obviously prefer a different language?
Quebec was a French colony, they lost a big war, they hate the monarchy and dream of independence from Britain and the English part of Canada.
Fascinating bit of history, thanks!