Bringing up kids to be bi-lingual

[Waedigirl]

Both DH and I are English, living permanently in Zürich. Obv speak English at home and with friends. DD is 8m and goes 3.5 days a week to a bilingual English / German nursery, which is if anything heavy on the Swiss German, with occasional activities in English.

Do I need to do anything in particular for her to be properly bilingual when she starts to talk or will it just be natural? Any tips or good books on the subject? Don't want to be pushy mother but would like to encourage her to read etc.

If she speaks English at home and mainly German at nursery/school, you will probably find she becomes bilingual quite naturally. You'll just have to work on her English reading and writing to keep them up if she learns more German at school.

I agree with RuthChan. She will absorb the German. She may mix the two languages a bit when she starts to talk, but eventually her brain will sort it all out. I do reading and writing in English with my dd, and leave the French stuff to the school.

For loads more on this subject...

You should find lots of people with experience to spare and share!

We are two Brits living in Spain and ideally would like DD to become bilingual, so know where you're coming from.

Good luck!

We're in a slightly different situation as I am English-speaking and DH is French (and we've lived in both environments), but I think it will come pretty naturally, although it's true that you will have to work on the reading and writing yourself (or you may find that there are some kind of workshops for English-speaking children).

I did read an excellent book called 'Growing up with Two Languages' by Staffan Andersson and Una Cunningham-Andersson, which covered both types of situation and had some good advice.

We're in a slightly different situation as I am English-speaking and DH is French (and we've lived in both environments), but I think it will come pretty naturally, although it's true that you will have to work on the reading and writing yourself (or you may find that there are some kind of workshops for English-speaking children).

I did read an excellent book called 'Growing up with Two Languages' by Staffan Andersson and Una Cunningham-Andersson, which covered both types of situation and had some good advice.

My dcs are 21, 19 and 10 and are bilingual. We both speak English at home and French was (for the older two)/is (for the younger one) the school language. The only "problem" I found say compared to my friends who have a French-speaking dh is that my dcs lacked adult French vocab which did make secondary school French when they started studying literature more difficult for them than their fellow students. However, the advantage of being bilingual far outweighs the disadvantage.

If the Swiss school system is anything like the Belgian one though, you might want to brush up on your German as your dcs might need some help with their enormous work load!

Hi, we used to live in Zurich & have now moved to Bavaria. Dh & I both british & we also only speak english at home.

Our 3 ds were at home maily only exposed to english till they started Kindergarten aged 5. All of them had a roughish 1st year at Kindergarten, then after 1st year something just clicked & they learnt really well. Ds1 now aged 10 often gets higher marks in German than his class mates.

Ds3 however, after 1.5 years of Kindergarten still seem to be struggling with his German. He is now 6 and will start school in September and I'm now wondering what we should do to help him. For us, just going with the flow has been enough for ds1 & 2, but seems to not be enough for ds3.

This has been a main reason I have put dd (aged 20 months) in the Krippe, so she can learn German as a baby.

If your dd is so young I wouldn't worry about it, as long as the b lingual place really does have a lot of emphasis on the German.

Another point of course, is you say the emphasis is on swiss german. YOur dd will then be learning swiss german as a baby in Kindergarten, but when she started school, she will then have to learn high german. For ds1 & 2 this wasn't a problem. But it is something to be aware of. A lot of swiss kids struggle at first to make the transition to high german, it is essentially a foreign language to them too.