To want to raise my child speaking German?

[BlauBlau]

So my family originally came from Germany, it was one of my grandparents who came from there. My grandparent spoke the language, but after emigrating, gradually forgot how to speak German.

I did German at school to GCSE level, and got an A*. So my German is conversational, but very basic (i.e: I speak German about as well as a 2 year old).

My monolingual toddler is over a year ahead in their English, so that's going well. Should I just swap to speaking German to them 100% of the time? Any music or TV I show them is in German.

How would I find other (probably much more fluent XD) German speaking families, so my little one could have playdates with German-speaking chilldren? I worry that, if it's only me speaking German to them, they won't be interested in speaking German.

I'm From Germany, speak fluent German, only speak to my two year old in German and still his vocabulary is 70% English. I'm afraid it's an uphill battle so don't be too hard on yourself if he doesn't pick it up.

I lived in Germany and had poor German but my kids were at a local kindergarten and became bilingual with a local accent which amused neighbours.

You can get language lessons over Skype these days too. It might help you speak German like a German rather than a text book lol school teaching.

Do you live in a city that might have social groups or schools where they teach in German ? My German is basic but I remember the nursery rhymes and football chants that the kids picked up at kindergarten.

So how does most of Europe end up with children fluent in English by the age of 12? Do there parents speak to them in it even if it isn't their first language?

You will quickly find that conversations with toddlers are WAY beyond GCSE level. They will ask questions where answers require a big vocabulary (and sometimes some complex philosophical or scientific concepts too!)
I recommend lots of holidays in Germany. Enjoy!

Your child won’t be bilingual but I think any exposure to another language at a young age is a good thing.

My dc have heard dh speak Dutch and German since babies, they are far from fluent but if they decide to work in these countries they will
have that language exposure already in their brains. Plus an understanding of the culture, different celebrations etc.

As a bit of fun, I speak French to my dc at breakfast even though I’m not a native speaker. We have a family duolingo going and sometimes have French subtitles on when watching tv together. No way will they become fluent from this but it helped gcse grades when they got to that point. I’m a big fan of exposure to different languages.

They don't.

No. I am not sure which countries you mean but no one around me was fluent in English by 12 except the half Americans😁
We have 1st foreign language at school at 7 or 8 (year 2or 3, we start at 6). I think similar goes around europe? Iirc we had 3 hours a week + homework. Language continues through college until 18 or 19. There is also another added on elementary schools now, but I only had another added at college.
O ccourse every coumtry has it different.

DHs first language is German and my 2 speak very little, just enough to say please and thank you etc and order in a restaurant. Unless you are using a language regularly at home the chances of your child speaking it well are pretty minimal .
However, they love Germany and enjoy visiting etc and are proud of their heritage (even if they get called Nazis regularly at school), they even have dual nationality.
Teach your child to love their heritage but don’t force a language on them that you don’t even speak yourself

Even if you are only GCSE level. That's a great base for a child to start.

They probably start learning it at school/kindergarten from 3 or 4

I'm raising my DD to be bilingual in English and Russian. The difference is that my DP and I are fluent, her native in Russian so it works. We use 1 parent, 1 language as well as having Russian media, family and friends. When DD is older, she will have Russian tuition too.

Now, at GCSE level in German, you're likely to be A1/A2 or threshold B1 depending on how active you have been with German to date. With this in mind, I wouldn't recommend that you try and do it the way you intend to.

I have a colleague at work who wants to ensure greater language learning in a non-native environment. The way they're doing it is to have private tuition and frequent trips to the target language country. They also have lots of materials (books, magazines, visual and audio media) available in the TL. They've had moderate success but they are literally in the TL country once a month for weekends.

In your case, you should look at private German tuition and frequent trips to Austria, Germany and Switzerland alongside native German speaker friends/playgroups (if available and only once you're at a suitable level to communicate yourself). Ensure you have plenty of easily accessible material available for your DC and work on your own German too.

Do not attempt to switch your life into 100% German. You should not confuse your DC. Stick to English.

You've had lots of good advice above, hope you can find groups to go to in order for you both to gain more language skills. I was always rather jealous of families near me who were in a position to bring their children up bilingually. (Having said that, DS has just done German A level and really threw himself into mastering it as far as he could these last 2 years. And one of his university offers could involve a year abroad which he'd seek to do in a German speaking city to improve it further).

If you're really lucky you might find that you can access bilingual schooling. I know a few families that use the Europa school in Oxfordshire which has French, German and Spanish streams.

And even then, most of Europe is nowhere near fluent in English even by adulthood, let alone at the age of 12.

In France most people in well paid professional jobs need to have a good level of English which is why it is a compulsory subject all through school and on most if not all university courses.

The average French adult will speak more English than the average English adult speaks French, but most are far from fluent, and this is the same in most European countries.

I get the impression that most teenagers and adults are reasonably fluent in English in Scandinavia and the Netherlands, and to a lesser extent in Germany.

I went to a family wedding in Poland and most of the Polish side had little to no English, but quite a few of them spoke decent Russian or German.

My mum was a French teacher so she had a degree in French and had spent several years living in France. My dad wanted her to speak French to us at home but she didn't because she thought it would be unnatural.

She did help us with our homework, encouraged us to do French GCSE and A-level, sent us on French exchanges and took us on frequent holidays to France.

I ended up living in France and married to a French man, which was how I eventually became bilingual.

I think she made the right call.

I am now having to stop her from trying to speak French to my kids though!

When I was a teacher in a school with a huge number of parents who didn't speak English well, we always always always asked them to speak their native language at home rather than English.

Most of language learning is the subconscious acquisition of grammatical structure and what "feels right". And at the stage children are at (where they're still subconsciously absorbing the basic concept of adjectives, nouns, adverbs etc), hearing native level Language X will help them in other languages too.

Hearing a native level of any language is what they need, and will give them a foundation for future language learning. Only hearing an error-riddled or non-fluent version of a language is going to set them back in every language.

As someone who is bilingual and who works professionally with multilingualism, I would have to say that it isn't possible to raise a bilingual child on a GCSE German. What you can definitely do, however, is raise your child's awareness of the language and make other languages and cultures interesting and fun. Get German children's TV in your home, go on holidays there, go to German events in your local area, order up some fun children's books. If your child is interested in languages, they are more likely to want to learn them later.

If you still want your child to be bilingual, then a German speaking nanny and enrolling them in a German speaking school would probably make them fluent, if not bilingual. Or move to Germany for some years.

Thank you all for the advice :) , I am very new to all of this. I will find a tutor, and look out for other people locally who speak German who my little one can spend time around.

@ApplesInTheSunshine @TheSnowyOwl @Nordicrain I know my toddler is 13 months ahead in expressive language because they were formally assessed on the Mullen Scale of Early Learning by a professional. I would never have known otherwise.

This in spades! We lived in a French speaking country for a few years and I vividly remember my ds, aged around 4, explaining to me that I, in fact, did NOT speak French as I could not help him label a pirate ship, after a previous similar failure at naming lots of different creepy crawlies😂
I thought I was pretty fluent but would never have attempted to raise the kids in French as I lacked the everyday ease and child specific vocab.

I'm so envious of your child. I would have loved to have been taught a second language in childhood, especially something like German or Russian or Italian. Beyond a certain age it definitely gets harder.

In the Netherlands they start English class at school at 6 multiple times per week and watch most YouTube in English. They learn it at the same as Dutch. Most signs are bilingual in the cities so you learn to read both at the same time. They're still not technically bilingual though and often find it hard work, but are very good in English. English ability also improves with improved socioeconomic conditions. Immigrant kids don't tend to have such good English because they're trying to learn both English and Dutch at the same time.

We used to live in Germany when we kids and so many German neighbours had children whose English speaking was helped along enormously by singing along to and hearing popular music.

David Hasselhoff was a teacher and he didn't even know it showing my age

In the nicest way possible - you're not fluent in German yourself, so how on earth are you going to speak it (and teach it) to your toddler?

A toddler will very quickly want to know a lot more than you're capable of teaching them which is just going to lead to frustration and tantrums (and not just from your toddler )

If you try and teach someone a language when you don't speak it properly yourself, you're just going to confuse them - and you'll potentially teach them the wrong things which is only going to cause even more confusion down the line.

I know that sounds negative but I speak from experience - my mum tried to teach me French when I was little but she was raised in a French-speaking country that wasn't France and so she didn't teach me proper French - so when I went to school and took French lessons, I was really confused by the fact that what I thought I knew was suddenly wrong and being corrected.

By all means get him a tutor or maybe a German-speaking babysitter or nanny, but I really think you'll cause more problems than you'll solve if you try and teach him yourself given that you're not even close to fluent.

They don't. I went on several foreign exchanges from age 11 and not one single person was even close to being fluent in English!

DH and I are native German speakers but have lived in the UK for 20 years. We speak German to our children but find when we go to Germany that our language is "out of date". We realise when we go to Germany that the way our children speak is not like the local children. My French is also at first year university level but no way good enough to raise a bilingual child.

Your idea is lovely but in practice I'm afraid I don't think it will work as you won't have sufficient breadth of vocabulary, the right accent and intonation etc. Try to introduce an interest in German culture which will hopefully encourage them to learn the language. For example we celebrate St Nikolas Day and we do "Laternenumzug" which they find great fun.