How do i teach my child to be trilingual even though im not?

[RBBMummy]

I have "passable" Spanish and BSL but i wouldn't say i could speak them per say. I would however like my son to grow up to be fluent in all three languages if possible but i don't really know how to go about it. He knows the basics like Numbers, Colours, Letters, a few animals, a few greetings, Please and Thankyou. But now i don't know where to go from here? Or if its best to teach them simultaneously or a chunk of one, then a chunk of the other? Or if this end up being a fruitless endeavor?

It is a hard one if you can't or family members fluently speak in other languages.
If you have enough money you can pay for tutor but child needs to be exposed to those languages as much as possible.
My child is trilingual however is still not keen on my native language, she likes more my husbands language. While at home we all communicate in english we do try to speak with her in our own languages. It is very hard. I am not a person who loves to talk a lot therefore it's more hard to teach her, while my husband can talk and talk amd therefore she picked his language up quicker.
Think of community groups you could attend. Maybe you have foreigner friends or meet some local mums and actually ask them to talk to your child or teach your child their language?
Another option there is always internet, youtube, online lessons and childrens movies! Believe me or not my brother learnt english from tv and noone could believe! :)

There are some children at his preschool who speak Spanish is their first language so i guess i should encourage him to make friends. I actually hadnt thought of foreign tv. I'll definitely look in to that, thanks!

The only thing with kids is unfortunately they still tend to speak english in between :( that is what I see always, unless you really keep encouraging them.
Yeah tv, videos, youtube is a great way to learn. Also there are some bilingual books now on amazon, I bought yesterday one so you can have a look at those

You would need to speak to him as much as you can in Spanish. I would set up play dates with the Spanish speaking children and then participate with them a little during the play date to try and encourage Spanish speaking. You can play simon says in Spanish etc. Youtube has tons of spanish cartoons, usborn language book sounds has a spanish version. It takes a lot of effort to raise a child fluent in another language when you are not yourself. Even when you are it takes a lot of effort! We are an English speaking family and we were lucky enough to get our kids into a French bilingual school. In addition we have a French au pair who only speaks to them in English and they think she does not know or understand English, so they speak to her only in French. After 6 months of this, my daughter was fluent. She was getting anywhere from 18-20 hours of French exposure a week. Now we have a live in au pair so she is getting more like 30 hours of French exposure a week. My son just started at the school this year and he has also become fluent in French now.

Perhaps you can sign your child up for some language learning programmes. I noticed a programme mentioned on this forum, saying that it provides opportunities for children in UK and China to communicate via video calls. You can find more like GrowAlong.

You're in fantasy land if you can think that parents who only speak one language between them can bring up a trilingual child. Sorry but it's ridiculous.

To be fully bilingual a child needs regular interaction with a native speaker of another language, so if that's not a parent it would need to be a nanny or au pair, and you would also need regular contact with others speaking the language as well as trips to the country and bilingual schooling and/or tutoring in the language.

It will be difficult to achieve that for a second language, let alone a third.

We speak regularly 3 languages at home English, Polish and Russian. When my DH's sister is coming then French too. Before the school my DD was speaking all three languages equally well, in fact, she was switching from language to language depending who she was speaking to at that moment. Once she went to school, she refuses to speak anything but English. Me and my DH keep talking to her our native languages, she understands everything, but still replies in English. Good luck grandmas! lol

My dd is sort of trilingual, in that she has grown up speaking three different languages from birth and is reasonably proficient in all of them. However, she is definitely more confident in English than in the other two, especially when it comes to writing.

One language is her dad's native tongue, one is mine and the third is one that DH and I both speak fairly fluently after having lived in the country where it is spoken for many years. However, while it has definitely helped that we both speak that third language, I don't think dd would have learnt the language in the same way if we had not also employed a nanny who was a native speaker of that language when she was very little, and had she not had regular exposure to other native speakers both here and when visiting that country.

If anything, I think she is actually more confident in that third language than she is in her dad's language. It's actually very, very difficult to bring up a child to be truly bilingual/trilingual to the extent that they speak both/all three to the same level as a monolingual native speaker. Not impossible but it requires a huge amount of effort and persistence. The language of the country where they're living tends to win out no matter what!

I think you could certainly offer your children exposure to the other languages that you mention, and that is still very valuable, but if you actually want them to grow up bilingual/trilingual, you will need to find a way of ensuring that they have very regular, sustained contact with native speakers.

I personally don't think you can. There is a huge difference between being bilingual or trilingual and fluent.
I am fluent in English and have lived in English speaking countries for 15years. I am not bilingual. My son is, we are using OPOL consistently from birth.
He has a native accent in both languages, I dont.
You might be able to teach 3 languages but to be bilingual you need a native speaker as a parent or to live in the country where that language is spoken.
I dont think people get that raising a bilingual child is not about teaching them random things or speaking sometimes in that language.

I think I might lower my expectations to speaking Spanish reasonably well. Trilingual without a native speakers influence might be very challenging. Could you do like the Cambridge’s and hire a Spanish nanny?
Mine all speak very good French from holidays, French after school club, French DVDs, French friends, school etc but are definitely not bilingual. Our best man’s children are but then they were born and grew up in France to British parents.
My youngest also speaks very good Spanish and Italian but then she’s chosen that as her degree and has spent considerable amount of time living in both countries.

I think there's a uniquely doom and gloom attitude in Britain about exposing kids to languages. Particularly there's this baffling idea that the only way to do it is "one parent one language" and that a parent has to be a native speaker to pass a language on to a child.

I don't agree with this at all. Most of my fluently English speaking friends from other European countries had parents who weren't native speakers who still spoke English to their kids to help them learn and supplemented that with TV and language classes.

Speak all the languages you know to your kid. Watch Spanish cartoons with him. Maximise exposure. Find a Spanish language Saturday school. Even if all he ends up with is "passable" Spanish like you have, it's better than nothing. You might not get a perfectly bilingual outcome but you can't do any harm.

People will be weird and judgy about it. Ignore them.

• I think there's a uniquely doom and gloom attitude in Britain about exposing kids to languages. Particularly there's this baffling idea that the only way to do it is "one parent one language" and that a parent has to be a native speaker to pass a language on to a child.

I don't agree with this at all. Most of my fluently English speaking friends from other European countries had parents who weren't native speakers who still spoke English to their kids to help them learn and supplemented that with TV and language classes. *
I am one of those Europeans fluent in 2 languages, and I didn't have bilingual parents.
Nobody here is saying that you need OPOL to learn another language, but there is a huge difference between being bilingual and being fluent.
I am fluent. My child is bilingual.

I'm not really sure that bilingual vs fluent is a particularly useful distinction to make. Especially since the definition of bilingual is "fluent in two languages".

What you probably mean is that your son

Oops hit send too early.

... That your son is a native speaker of two languages.

When it's obvious that OPs kid will never be a native Spanish speaker, it's absolutely possible for him to become a fluent Spanish speaker, which I would argue would make him functionally bilingual.

@mondaysaturday the Cambridge dictionary defines bilingual as someone who can speak 2 languages equally well.
What I mean is that my son is bilingual, and I am not. I am fluent in English.
He is able to understand and speak both equally well.

It is a very useful and correct distinction to make. Because being bilingual and being fluent are different.

I disagree about it being a useful distinction to make (and I also disagree with the practicality of the definition you've given, as "equally well" is an almost impossible thing to define and language ability can be in flux depending on the circumstances at different points in a person's life).

The reason I dislike it as a distinction is that it's completely meaningless in reality unless you fall into a very neat category.

For example, I'm a native speaker of language A and a heritage speaker of small minority language B. My mother was an acquired speaker of language C, taught it to me and then I lived and completed part of my education in a country where language C was dominant, so became fluent in that. Then I learned language D because I moved again as a young adult to a country where that was spoken. Then I met DH who is a native speaker of language A and a heritage speaker of language E through his native speaker father. I then learned language E.

My DH has an accent and occasionally forgets the odd word in language E despite being raised with OPOL by native speaker parents so I guess he's not bilingual by your very definition. I speak my "acquired" language C now much better than my native/heritage language B because I haven't used it since childhood which would make me, again by your definition, either monolingual or bilingual in A and C despite having been raised as bilingual in A and B with C as an acquired language. I have friends in similar situations. You just can't pigeonhole these things.

It's also a horrible distinction because not only does it have no practical merit but it really only exists as a distinction to imply that there's some kind of cultural purity in being more "native" than someone who is an acquired speaker or a second or third generation heritage speaker. My DH especially has had to put up with "oh you're not really X" all his life from both the culture he grew up in and from people from his heritage culture who just want to gatekeep things from both sides. By drawing lines in the sand you're just enforcing attitudes like that.

Cambridge gives the definition, not me
dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/bilingual

I lost count of how many times you say "your definition"
It is not mine, it is from Cambridge dictionary.
I am sorry you feel somehow upset for the Cambridge definition or whatever bad experience you had.
There is no way that I, or any of my European fluent English speakers refer to them as bilingual in a job application, you can do as you see fit, but there is bilingual and there is fluent, and no amount of paraphrasing will change that.
I have lived in English speaking countries most of my life, but I can't call myself bilingual.
I am fluent and not ashamed of not being perfectly bilingual.
You dont have to.
Accents are part of life.
My son doesn't have one in either language but I do.
Not better not worse, just different.

I mean, the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as "Speaking two languages fluently". So the definition you've chosen clearly isn't the only one in common use and isn't universally accepted.

The implications what you're saying are really really not ok. Language is how people culturally integrate. You're saying that there is a hierarchy of language and those with native speaker parents are above those without. You're saying that no matter what someone does, if they don't have the "right" cultural background then they can't be considered "real" speakers and honestly, you might be fine applying that label to yourself because you have nothing to lose, maybe you're from a culture where you get to be an "ex pat" and not an "immigrant" but for some groups language gatekeeping is just another way that people dress up racism avd xenophobia.

You've also completely failed to define where second or third generation heritage speakers from immigrant communities get pigeonholed in your hierarchy of bilingual vs not bilingual language speakers.