worried about confusion

[olatt]

dh is french, and we speak french at home. i'm english but have always spoken a mix to ds (2yrs), just whichever language came naturally. he's speaking both languages, though english is stronger of the 2, but we've come back from 2 weeks in france and he's mixing up languages (eg i put it in my bouche - cute but confused!). should i be sticking to my mother tongue or is it ok to speak both?

apparently yr dh should only speak french to ds and yr should only speak eng 2 him, thats the text book way. My friend who is french does this and it works well 4 her

My sister married a venezuelan and went to live there. She only spoke to the children in English, their father and everyone else in Spanish. She didn't answer them if they addressed her in Spanish even though she was fluent in it before living there. It took discipline on her part to stick to it but it worked.
However it worked better with 1st child as when the younger ones came they all just chunnered together in Spanish with my sis shouting over the top in English.

It is common until perhaps 4yrs or more to appear 'confused', its also common for young children to only use one language despite understanding both. It is not a negative thing though, it just takes some time for them to sort between the two languages, inside their brains they are busy learning and understanding them both, it just takes a certain developmental leap to be competent to switch between the two at appropriate times.

It is helpful for children to have one parent speaking one and the other speaking the second language. Or for the mother tongue to be spoken in the home and the second language when outside the home as much as possible.

olatt, if I were you stick to English and let dh do the French. We have 1 parent 1 language rule here too . Well most of the time. If dd (5.5) absolutely insists that she doesn't understand me (mainly because she doesn't want to) I say it VERY briefly in English and then again in German. Ds 2.9 does mix the languages but I'm not concerned at all. Actually rather amusing when dh stares at him trying to make out what he's saying LOL

Main language spoken by the kids is English though as they get exposed more with school, friends, tv etc. also I speak English with dh

IMO (coming from a multilingual family) it does not matter, as long as whatever languages you speak are spoken fairly well and used day-to-day.

My family spoke one language, we lived in another country and went to nursery where my brother learned a second language which he and I used outside the home and to each other(mum and dad didn't speak it much). Then we moved to England where my parents barely ever used English at home (although they became fluent in it) and we learned English at school. Over the years we spoke a mixture of English and mother tongue, depending on where we were and with whom we spoke. My parents often spoke a fourth language to each other, but because they never spoke it to us we never learned it. Not beyond a few stock phrases, anyway.

Around the time my sister was born, my parents were told to stop speaking to us in our mother tongue as we were confused. OK pronunciation was accented, and we sometimes skipped between languages, but we certainly understood everything and communicated well. So my sister was brought up only in English.

Result: all three of us are fluent in English and always did extremely well in language tests/exams. But my brother and I learned other languages at school fairly easily, with good accents, whereas my sister found it harder and has had to learn our mother tongue as an adult, and will never speak it without an accent.

Olatt,
I am catalan/spanish and as such, when I was a kid, I spoke catalan with family,friends, shcools books were in Spanish, but teaches taugh in catalan, the tv, books and newspapers were all in spanish, and for me switching from catalan to spanish has never been a problem. Now, I have been living in England for almost 12 years, and I found it very easy to learn to think in English. Now I have two daughters, and I speak to them in catalan almost all the time, but because my DH is brittish, we speak english, with me, speaking in catalan as much as I can with my two daughters. My eldest, uderstands catalan very well, but she doeasn't speak to me, but she speaks catalan to my family when we travell there. But she used to get confused when she was younger, she is 6 now, but she is getting getting better. I have never forced her to speak to me in catalan as I didn't want her to dislike the languange.
Just keep doing what you have done until now, if you feel confortable doing it.

He probably isn't confused - its more likely that he doesn't know the english for 'bouche' and is just being clever using the word he does know. Mine did that at that age too.

I was always advised to do one person one language when they were young but now they are teenagers we all speak a horrendous mixture at times. I've been here so long that sometimes I can't remember the english word I want so throw in the greek word!

funny thing is he used both 50/50 when it was just words rather than phrases, but since he's been building phrases he uses mostly english. not worried really but we are planning on moving to france so i want him to be as comfortable as poss in both for school, making friends etc

I too would recommend speaking to your ds only in your respective mother tongues. That way your son can associate a different language with each of you and start to differentiate them better.

We also use the OPOL (one parent one language) approach, with me speaking German and dh speaking English to our dd (5) and ds (3). My 5 year old speaks both languages quite well and rarely mixes them up, whereas my 3 year old does use some (often German) words/expressions when he talks English to dh (e.g. "can you make the light out", "weiss ich not" etc.). I am not too concerned about this as it probably just takes him a little longer to separate the languages. I do feel that consistency is important, though.

My two year old knows that Curious George is a "monkey", but his other stuffed monkey toy is a "saru" and woe betide anyone who says anything else.

We live in Australia, DH doesn't speak Japanese and I really don't push it (I'm not a native speaker but teach it and am starting a PhD in Japanese literature).

DS and I play games and sing songs in Japanese and I don't want to push it despite the fact that DH would love him to be bilingual. All the reading I;ve done says that unless you can fluently baby-talk in the language don't try. But it does seem to make sense.

M