To wonder how on earth to raise a child bilingual?

[EstherE]

DH is from country X, I am English and we live in England. DH’s family only speak their language, my family only speak English. I speak X language but not perfectly fluently. We want to move back to X, but it won’t be for ten years or more.

How can we raise our child to be bilingual so they can communicate with their paternal family integrate when we move back? I don’t know anyone who’s done it successfully, and we can’t send our child to an X language school as they’re only in London, or boarding schools.

I wonder what age would be considered "old enough" @Matronic6 ?

That was my original plan with learning reading but he just wasn’t interested at 4/5.

As children learn a language, they’re subconsciously building an internal grammar. English has about 20 tenses and a huge amount of non-native speakers don’t learn to use them properly. In the country we‘re in people tend to translate a bunch of nouns into English to communicate. English is a verb-based language. If that’s the English a child is learning, he won’t become fluent and it’s a lot of work for both speaker and later teachers to correct that grammar and make it automatic.

It‘s different to a nursery teacher speaking dialect- which does follow an inherent grammar and can be translated into a high version of the language if desired.

Think it's for parents to decide if and when their child is ready for such an approach, they would have the best understanding of their childs proficiency/ability.

once old enough they insist on child speaking to them in that language.

My personal experience was that if you don't do it from the start, it's really challening to implement later.

We live abroad and have a lot of friends where the parents are from 2 different countries, speak English to each other & then the children learn the local language when they’re at school. For example, Dad Danish, Mum French, parents speak their own language to their children & English to each other, children learn another language when they start local school.

We are both English and our children have learned the local language here at school and now switch happily between the two as do our friends children between their other mother tongues.

I think it just takes consistency and clear boundaries, but I know dozens of families here with pre-school and school aged children where it’s the norm for children to speak at least 2 languages fluently (in fact our children are probably unusual, in this group of friends, for only speaking 2 languages!

i have bilingual kids and live in husbands country. i would advise moving anywhere before your child is 10 years old, it is too difficult and working in an international school i see countless troubled teens who just want to go back home.
i spoke to my kids in english and hubby used his language.

This method is called OPOL (one parent one language) and there is plenty of resources and advice on the internet how to do it.
why are you so worried?

My dd and I try to only speak at home, but are not rigid about it, and the rest of dgd's life is in Spanish, the local language. But she also watches a lot of programmes on youtube in English

OPOL
Each parent uses their first language to speak to the children. Always.

TV and devices should always be in the language they hearing less of.

For the parent that is not in thier home country, it can be hard to get used to speaking thier own language in front of people who don't understand it, or I public at first, but you get uses to it.

If the children when older decide to answer in thier dominant language it doesn't matter. They still understand, and will be able to speak when needed. It's probably a good time to irganize some travel and put them in the situation where they need to speak thier 2nd language.

Bringing up children is bilingual in a family that loves talking to each other is simple and natural. Families that don't talk much and use a lot of screens struggle.

It’s harder to pick up the dad’s language especially if you all live in a country where everyone speaks the mum’s language. It’s going to take a LOT of commitment from your DH.

My tip: Watch lots of films with the dad’s language as the sound track - no english!
Peppa Pig and Dora available in lots of language combinations too. No telly in English!

We found it difficult. We have 5. Number 1 is pretty much trilingual, but has studied in English and realistically only could work at that level in English. Number 2 got in with a crowd of DH’s home language through school. Not so strong in English, not strong enough in DH’s language. Not great. Number three understands both languages, but only speaks English. The 4th glued to english, dropped out languages at nursery. I don’t know how she understands so little. Number 5 we’d given up and it’s an English speaking household nowadays.

Just adding support for this idea.

I love chatting with people who speak 'flawed' English, and I love it when they chat with my kids (for whom English is a minority language).

Not only is it some small practice but it also helps my kids avoid the annoying accent deafness from which a lot of native speakers of any language seem to suffer.

English especially is a mongrel language with a HUGE variety of native and second-language accents/variants. Any native English speaker who can't easily switch from Glaswegian-accented English or Shanghai-accented English to Indian-variety English or Kenyan native English (for example) is at a massive disadvantage.

You don't need to be perfectly well-spoken to be allowed to chat with your kids in any language. Lord knows how many grammatical errors I make/hear in my mother tongue.

SLT here.

False and not best practice.

Your DH needs to solely speak to her in the language at home. She will pick up English at school. Other parents have enrolled their children into Saturday language classes. But the more exposure she has, the better, as a bilingual child can lose their other language skills (not the majority language that they reside in) very quickly! Expose her to books in the language, TV programmes. It would be better if your DH does it as he is fluent in the language and can provide the best language model... if you speak the language but it sounds broken, your child will speak broken in that particular language.

The difficult when raising a bilingual child is not when you speak the additional language, but it's retaining their bilingualism which is the hardest part. The more exposure the child has to the language, the better and the frequency of speaking to others in the additional language

I’m doing it as well as a dozen others I know. I’m living abroad and I have seen different approaches from friends too.
my kids definitely have a stronger native language (where we are living) than they do English as they have much more exposure to it. Out of all the people I know I think our kids have a better grasp on English than the others. I can only guess it’s because my husband and I speak English together (but he speaks his mother tongue with the kids) and whenever Netflix or cartoons are on it’s always in English.

As they get older in school now and clubs and sports maintaining their language skills is harder but they have an excellent base and can have no problem communicating.

Some of my friends kids refuse to speak English as they don’t want to stick out or be different and that’s also quite common once they go to school.

if you can you and husband can talk in the house together in his language. Movies books and music in the language too. More facetime or voicemails/video mails from family.
goodluck

Husband only talks to DC in his language. Encourages development of vocabulary.

When I say 'flawed', I absolutely don't mean different accents/dialects/varieties of English* - I mean what ALittleDropofRain was talking about - English spoken by people who have only ever learned it as an additional language (and not via significant immersion) themselves and, more often than not, overestimate their ability and draw on stereotyped cultural ideas in their use of the language.

(*Tbh I find the idea that anyone would attach the label 'flawed' to those peculiarly English in itself. I speak 'Standard' Southern British English and have to do a lot of explaining that it is only another variety of English and not actually the non plus ultra)

I understand you completely and take your point. It's simply that I disagree, and find children"s conversations with ESL speakers to have a lot of value. Although I think we agree that it's not ideal to have a beginner be the ONLY source of the second language, this is more of a supplementary situation.

I used the example of variants to point to the fact that spoken English is so malleable there is a vast grey area that crosses over between ESL and native variants of English, and I believe that all exposure is useful in some way but particularly to avoid that accent-deafness I mentioned.

The same goes for Dutch, I think. Listening to me fumble my way through that language has been enormously helpful to my son as he just doesn't have the same problem understanding foreigners that the locals seem to have.

Oh definitely yes to the grey area. International English(es) is (are) a variant (varients) in themselves, really.

I think the key thing I'm objecting to is that overestimation of ability, actually. I see a lot of pushy ESL parents 'raising their child as bilingual' (in their words) because they think their English is, to all intents and purposes, as good as a native speaker's. (These are the same ones who take it upon themselves to correct me...). If someone is aware of their level of proficiency and uses that within a setting where there are other sources, that's different, I think.

I see what you mean now. Yes, I have come across that kind of stridency before, where a question about grammar, for example, is more like a challenge.

(Wait, did we just have a pleasant conversation and share differing opinions without tension or sarcasm? On the internet??! 😆)

I'm bilingual and never had language issues as a child. My parents always spoke to me in our native language since birth, so when I started kindergarten I didn't actually know any English. But kids pick things up really quickly. My mum reasoned since we live, and I'd be educated, in England there's no way I won't understand or know English, but there is always the chance that I won't know/understand my mother tongue so that's why they spoke to us in the native language first. Yes, I'm not proficient in writing but I am fluent at speaking and reading and now work in this country.

Same with all of my cousins. It's definitely not an issue if you are consistent.

Ha! I will put that right and find something tiny in your post to jump aggressively on immediately