School choice and learning more languages

[thanksamillion]

I'd be really interested to hear your opinions on this. We're an English family living in a Romanian speaking country. We all speak Romanian reasonably well and DD1 is in her second year at a local kindergarten and is fairly fluent.

We need to choose a school for her next year and have two options. All schools here teach Russian (to a reasonably high standard) but one of the schools also does English and the other French.

Obviously the level of English would be way below her (we speak English at home and she can read/write it fine), but would it be too much to add in a fourth language with French? Any experience/advice welcome

It would depend on your daughter's language ability. Children have varying levels of aptitude for language, be they monolingual, bilingual or polyglot.

If your daughter's language development has been OK, there shouldn't be any reason why she can't be immersed in a third or fourth language however the school is important. We have a daughter who is being raised with 4 languages (3 from birth, another at school) and who is performing better than average at school.

There are many parts of the world where children are naturally exposed to multiple languages - I have friends in South Africa, Switzerland and Belgium whose children are being raised with 3 or more languages. I also have met plenty of monolinguals who speak their one language worse than some non-native speakers.

Check out the schools, if the bilingual ones have a professional immersion approach then go for it, don't chose a bilingual school just for the sake of it.

When I grew up in Sweden, 3 modern languages was the normal number learnt by those who were taking humanities and thinking in terms of higher education; those of us who were into history added Latin and Greek as well, bringing the total up to 5. Noone ever told us this was supposed to be too much or did any special tests on linguistic aptitude, this was just how things were.

thanks both of you. It isn't the only deciding factor but I take both your comments on board!