How I´m raising a multilingual child

That´s me playing at Luísa´s kindergarten here in Costa Rica

One of the biggest reasons of why I decided to take off from Brazil and live for one year in Costa Rica was that my daughter would learn to speak Spanish and English. The easy way: by deep immersion. The official language here is Spanish, but there´s a heavy influence by the US and many locals speak English. Besides this, most private schools are bilingual.

Every since Luísa was a baby, I read to her in English, almost exclusively. I kept buying myself books in English because I would read out loud my own books often too. She heard lots of Charles Bukowski, which is far from appropriate content…

I also sang songs with my guitar (here´s a video of me singing in her kindergarten in Brazil)  and I tried to play and speak in English in the house as much as possible. It wasn´t much actually, but it was something. (here´s my first post on how I was teaching her)

She also watches videos on the computer mainly in English.  She only started watching videos after she was two years old and at times she could do it for about one hour and this year it´s less than half hour and not every day. We don´t have a TV and I highly control what she watches. I´m a bit psycho on this, even at restaurants with the TV on, I´ll have them change the channel or turn it off or simply leave.

At her kindergarten here in Costa Rica, the main teacher speaks English and the assistant Spanish. The children speak mostly in Spanish.

Luísa is now fluent in Spanish and can switch to English with no problems (her English is funny, but it works).

For the last few months, we´ve been speaking mostly Spanish in the house. She speaks naturally in Spanish and I simply answer back in Spanish. I was avoiding speaking Portuguese all that I could, because I thought I was going back to Brazil in December.

Only that I decided to stay longer, probably for another year and now I´m trying to speak in Portuguese again. Yes, trying, because weird enough, I´ve trained myself so hard to not waste our language learning with Portuguese, that I finally did it: I speak to her mostly in another language spontaneously. Especially now that she doesn´t speak any Portuguese at all, it´s so simple for me to keep the conversation in her language.

But I´ve been trying to speak more Portuguese again, given the fact that I´m the only Portuguese speaker in this town.

It´s been interesting all these language switches. For one thing, every time I´m switching between languages, it makes me instantly more aware of the words and actions I´m taking at that moment.

Speaking different languages with my child helps me therefore in parenting, because I´m trying to do things with more intention and awareness: thinking, speaking and acting.

Multilingual friends

Luísa´s current best friend is Italian. They are always hanging out in Spanish, but eventually, when Luísa is over her friend´s house, she gets to hear the mother speaking some Italian. And well, I speak to the mother mostly in Italian too, but we also make that mix of two languages often.

Sometimes in our home, she´ll say something in Italian she learned at her friend´s house, like: ¨Che bella!¨ How beautiful. She asks me how to say things in Italian, so sometimes I let her watch a cartoon on you tube in Italian, she likes repeating some of it outloud.

Luísa has a couple of friends with American parents, who she talks to in both Spanish and English, and there are parents of different nationalities here, so it´s a real multicultural and multilingual environment.

Multilingual benefits

There are many benefits for knowing other languages, but here´s one that seems more important than having more chances to get a job in the future (I hope my daughter never has a job and work in various freelance projects instead): it increases divergent thinking. Here´s a nice article on this.

And as I was browsing around this subject, I found also the article Why Should Young Children learn a Foreign Language? from which I´ll quote directly this:

¨Studies show that children as young as 3-4 years of age begin to develop impressions, positive and negative, about other peoples and customs. This process continues until it begins to solidify into stereotypes by the time they are 10-12 years of age. Providing opportunities for very young children to learn about and experience other cultures gives them a more global perspective before negative stereotypes become entrenched.¨ NICE!

I have to admit that for me it´s relatively easy to do all this because I do speak fluently Portuguese, Spanish English and Italian. It´s not that easy because you really have to train yourself to practice the language you want your kid to learn the more you can, therefore at times not speaking in the most natural way for you.

It´s also as weird as it seems and I´m not a strict person at all, so very often I speak a mix of two languages, that might not be the best thing to do, but it comes naturally.

There´s a family of (originally) monolingual parents raising a trilingual girl (English, Spanish and Chinese Mandarin). You can check their experience with all this here.

Now, will all these languages stick? I have no idea. I know that while it´s easy for my daughter to learn now, it´s also easy for her to forget if we stop practicing. Only time will tell what´s going to happen. But I will be diligent about the English and once we are back to Brazil, I plan on finding a Spanish speaker friend to meet with us a few times a week.

Do you have any experience teaching and/or learning new languages with your child?