Introducing second language

[NIspice]

My fiancé has been living in London since he was four. He is from Japan, his parents and siblings live here, but most of his family is in Japan (some also in uk, some elsewhere) We have a two year old daughter and another child on the way(sex is a surprise)

ive been told we should start introducing her to the language and we have, but I’m not sure how to go about it. so we have a time slot during the day where my fiancé primarily speak Japanese.
We have friends and family who help, along with books and various songs and Japanese kids shows she can watch.

Are there any nurseries we can look into that may be beneficial to her? We found one, but they focus on English and Mandarin. Would that be helpful?

I do speak Japanese too, it is my fourth language, I started to learn when we first started dating and really cracked down during 2020. I can converse, read, and even sing in the language pretty well. When is comes to teaching it to my child is when I get nervous.

im not even from London originally, im from NI, but lived here for years.
other than English, I speak(read) a bit of Irish, and fluent in French, for those curious

There is a Japanese school in Acton (Ealing) for when your child is a little older than nursery age.

I will look into that, thank you very much

A relative lives in Brussels and the school teaches in French. She is English and her husband is Dutch. From birth she spoke English to her kids, her DH spoke Dutch to them, and they learned French from nursery. They are now trilingual.

In my experience I think your husband should speak Japanese all the time at home and you speak English to her. That should be enough without needing special schools etc although you could use those also.

This. Be very very disciplined about it. Alternatively as your Japanese is good would you consider making that the home language?

I also agree with helpmum and titchy - one parent should speak only Japanese, and the other only English. Start ASAP, the earlier the better. Don't let your DP ask a question in Japanese and get an answer in English.

But I'd add...my 3 kids speak English as first language and are educated in English, and spoken Azerbaijani is more or less fluent. But their written Azerbaijani is terrible, almost non-existent. IMO it's important to introduce reading and writing at the earliest opportunity. And that's probably all the more important in Japanese where the alphabet is so different.

And...expose your children to Japanese on TV - you can watch Netflix in Japanese with English subtitles, for example. When you eventually give a tablet, set it up in Japanese etc. Take every opportunity. English won't be a problem, they will be swamped with that anyway.

Look on it as a long term investment in their future - in the UK, a UK citizen with fluent Japanese should be very employable!

Make the language at home Japanese. Your Japanese will improve quickly.
Your children will pick up English from a young age by immersion and will have the advantage of being bilingual.

OPOL - one parent one language. Your DH needs to speak exclusively Japanese and you exclusively English, ideally from birth.

We're a German/English household and have taken the OPOL approach. DC is now 10 years old and bilingual. It's also helped me a lot, as I've picked up a lot of German just by osmosis (to supplement what I learnt at school) and can hold a fairly reasonable conversation & read it.

Your fiancé needs to speak only Japanese to your child, not just for a certain amount of time each day, otherwise it will be much much harder for your children to learn Japanese. See if you can find a Saturday School for them when they're older as that'll help a lot too - being around other children that speak Japanese will encourage them to use it even more.

My children are bilingual, we do OPOL and have English (minority language) as the family language. Agree with the poster who said to introduce reading and writing at the earliest opportunity, won't be easy but worth it in the long run.