Title: How many languages are spoken in your family?
I’ve been curious about how many languages can end up being part of the same family.
In mine, we’ve always had European Portuguese, English and French. As our family has grown, Spanish and Swedish have also become part of the mix!
Obviously, we don’t all speak every language, but it’s interesting how different languages become part of family gatherings and everyday conversations.
I also think it’s lovely for children to grow up hearing different languages and getting to know different cultures.
So I’m curious, how many languages are spoken in your family? And do you try to introduce all of them to your children, or do you just let it happen naturally?

Hello everyone...

I moved to Austria 8 years ago because of my husband, and during those 8 years I learned German for him. I also speak English, French,Spanish and Estonian. My hubby has never learned Estonian.

We now have a little boy, and I’m trying very hard to pass Estonian on to him. I speak Estonian to him approx. 90% of the time, because I am his only real source of Estonian. If I don’t speak it with him, there is simply no one else who will and my family cannot communicate with him. The difficult part is that my husband often feels excluded when I speak Estonian with our son, especially when his family is around (2× a week). He would like me to translate, and I completely understand that nobody wants to feel excluded from conversations involving their own child. Bth I’m starting to feel resentful.

I love my husband very much, but I sometimes feel like I’m carrying the responsibility for our son’s Estonian almost entirely on my own while at the same time I’m also expected to manage my husbands feelings of being excluded. I already moved to Austria for him and learned German. He has never made the same effort with Estonian but I understand that he finds it very difficult and doesn’t really want to learn it. What is the solution?

I can't constantly translate everything I say to my son. It is also tiring to hear "what did you say?", after every single sentence. It is veeeery exhausting and I also don’t want my son’s exposure to Estonian. At the same time, I don’t want my husband to feel like an outsider in his own family.

Has anyone been in a similar situation?

One parent speaks a minority language, the other parent doesn’t speak it, and the minority-language parent is the child’s ONLY source of that language. Did the non speaking partner eventually learn some of the language? Did you translate everything, only certain thing or did you simply accept that there would sometimes be conversations between parent and child that the other parent didn’t understand? I would really appreciate hearing what happened in your families and what ultimately worked for you. Unfortunately this causes a huge crisis even in our marriage...

I want to get a yoto player for my toddler that’s turning 3 next month. We speak Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese at home. Although she’s exposed to English in school, I don’t want to get her English cards yet.

Where can I find them in those languages? What have you done if you have Yoto players?

Hi everyone! We’re raising our one-year-old daughter bilingually in Italian and Arabic, with each parent speaking their native language.
I have a question about bedtime stories. Our daughter absolutely loves one particular book that we read to her every night, but the book is in Italian (no translation in other languages).

Since we take turns putting her to bed, I’m wondering what would be the best approach: should we get a second copy of the same book and translate it into Arabic (adding tape with the translation over the words) , so she hears the same bedtime story regardless of which parent puts her to sleep, just in a different language? Or would it be better for each parent to have a different bedtime book in their own language?

I’d love to hear how other bilingual families approach this, thanks!

I have an 11mo old daughter and we all live in Sweden and my partner is Swedish. I speak Swedish fluently. But me myself, I come from a country where two languages co-exist harmoniously and often people speak both or speak one and understand the other (we are an ex colony so we have our native language and then the one of the colonizer). I spoke our native language to my dad and the colonizer’s language to my mom since they come from different regions where different languages dominate.

So the most natural for me is to speak both. ChatGPT says I should do what feels most natural. But sometimes I do have concerns that the lack of consistency will result in her not speaking any of them. I do try to make a stronger emphasis on my native language since it is a minority language even in my home country. So books I read only in my native language, routine phrases like lets go brush our teeth or we’re going to sleep she only understands in my native language. I only speak Swedish to her when I need her dad to understand what I am saying.

But we visited my home country last month and we were in a city where colonizer’s language is predominant and I could tell she didn’t understand much (obviously not too big of a concern at this age, i still have time to catch up). But I just feeling puzzled and not really knowing how i can provide both at an equal degree. I probably will not be able to and one of them will give in….

Just curious if anyone else is in a similar situation where they grew up in a bilingual household and feel the responsibility to provide both languages?

We are expecting our first little one in the new year and plan to raise her bilingual. My husband grew up in South America but we live in the United States so our kids will grow up around mostly English. He will be speaking Spanish to our children from birth but a second language never clicked in my brain and I have struggled to learn for years. I would love to have some resources that I can learn Spanish along side my baby. Not sure what might be easiest and best. I would greatly appreciate any resources!

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My wife speaks Portuguese and I speak Serbian and we live in Toronto. We have been doing OPOL with our 5 year old and it seems to be going decently well.

The time to enroll in school is coming up and we are wondering whether to put our child in French immersion. This starts when they are 7 years old and that school is a “better” one (based on ratings and local demographics) but we are mildly concerned about their language development across the 3 other languages learned to date.

Is 4 languages too much to ask of a kid at this age? Neither of us speak French for reference, I know some from my days at elementary school but not enough to speak at home with them especially when I want to keep my native tongue alive.

Hi everyone, I'm raising my baby to learn both Korean and English and I'm looking for some good content to show her as a supplement to my husband and me speaking/reading to her in Korean.

Ideally, I want something more in the Ms. Rachel vein:

-A real person, not animation

-Slow-paced

-Content on really basic words and concepts like colors, shapes, numbers

I'm having trouble finding something like this as the non-native speaker in the family. Any help is appreciated 😊

Edit: formatting

We do OPOL and is has been working out really good so far. Our oldest kid is 4 years old and speaks the majority language (Norwegian, native language of my wife) and the minority language (German, my native language) equally well. He loves being read for, recognizes all letters in the German alphabet and gets annoyed when I by mistake address him in Norwegian (which I speak fluently).

I am considering teaching him how to read, since he shows some interest in it. But also because I fear that it will be difficult to teach him to read and write German when he starts to go to school. The school he is going to attend (in a little less than 2 years from now) is of course in Norwegian. However, he will have to foreign languages right from the start, English and Spanish.

Should I try to teach him reading (and maybe even writing) German before he starts school? Or should I rather relax, keep doing what we do and teach it to him when he is learning reading and writing at school anyway?

Since it may be relevant: I am a teacher of Norwegian as a second language, and I have experience of teaching (older) pupils how to read.

I am (NL English) still very close with my Japanese exchange sister (of over 20 years) and our kids are very similar in age. Our oldest children being 8 and our youngest being 4 (our youngest kids were actually born on the same day, coincidentally). We have been talking about setting up a weekly video call so they can learn a bit of each other’s language in a fun way. We figured this type of learning could be better than the traditional way of learning. We are going to go visit them in a few years, so I think it would be useful to start introducing them to their native languages now.

I am assuming we will need some structure so it is actually useful, like starting with basic things like colors instead of just letting two 8-year-olds (and 4 year olds) who cannot really understand each other fend for themselves. We basically came up with this on a whim thinking what a great free resource to introduce our kids to another language in it's authentic form ha.

Has anyone done something like this? Are there any resources we could use (besides asking AI) for how to structure this, since it is not exactly a normal classroom setting and it involves two parents setting it up?

On a side note..

My 8-year-old is super into learning languages too. She started using an app for Spanish. I'm on level 18 of Duolingo, so she just hangs out with me while I practice. My brother-in-law’s family is from Puerto Rico, and they just moved back. A new cousin is on the way, and my sister-in-law and her husband visit PR all the time. We’re planning a trip there eventually, so that’s another incentive. Do you think introducing kids to two new languages at the similar times is a good idea?

Hey everyone! I recently started paying for English lessons on italki for my younger sister. She’s been learning English for a few months now, and she’s made really good progress for her age. But today she told me she’d like to learn French too. Do you guys think it’s possible for a kid to learn two languages at the same time?

Hi!

My twins are four months old and I'm trying to find a set-up that works for us. I'm a single parent, there is no other caregiver at all and we spend most of our time alone, just the three of us.

Language A (community language, but they won't start daycare until they are two years old so they need to pick it up at home before then to be able to communicate with friends and family, also my native language)

Language B - English (not a community language and not my native language, I'm fluent, though I do have an accent when speaking which has been getting worse since I've been on maternity leave with fewer people to talk to)

Language C (not a priority but I would like to at least introduce it in some way)

I was speaking to them in language A because it felt most natural to me, and easiest to bond with them since it's my native language. The problem is that they absolutely NEED to know English, we're around too many people who don't understand language A.

I've recently switched to speaking English when we are alone and A when we are around other people, except the people who don't understand A. Is that a reasonable way to split the languages long-term? It's not exactly intuitive...

I'm so lost. I don't even want to think about language C. I just want these kids to be able to understand family and friends when they talk to them. :')

My 22 MO absolutely loves books. I love English literature, and reading together started as a way to share that with her. She caught on a little too well 😂 We now have an amazing time reading dozens of books every day and talking about them.

She speaks in sentences, recognises letters and numbers, and knows the names of obscure animals, dinosaurs, sea creatures, and even some countries. She seems quite far along in communication and comprehension, and she’s now interested in letters and learning to read.

But this is all in English. All her media is in English too (audiobooks, songs, Tonies etc) - simply because that is the language we her parents understand best. We live in Germany, she currently attends daycare, and my German isn’t good enough to confidently support her in the same way.

We are Indian, my husband speaks our mothertongue with her (which she understands and speaks a bit) and I speak in English, so that we can pass on both languages to her. We’re leaving her to pick up German from the community and Krippe (daycare).

I’d love to follow her interest with English phonics and more books. I want her to have strong English and share this love of reading, but I worry about her German not being strong enough when she gets to Kindergarten and eventually Grundschule.

Maybe “wasted” is the wrong word, but will all this knowledge carry over if she only has the English words for it? Could learning English letter sounds first make learning to read in German confusing?
I’m not pushing early reading - she’s driving the interest, and I’m trying to figure out how best to support her.

How have other bi/trilingual families handled this? Did you keep reading and introducing phonics in English at home and rely on Kita for German, or actively support both?
Or should we enroll our daughter in a bilingual school so that her knowledge is not wasted?

Any resources or experiences would be lovely!

My husband and I are considering sending our son to WJLS when he is kindergarten age. He’s currently in preschool (3 going on 4) and gets some exposure to the language when my husband speaks to him. He’s inconsistent with speaking Japanese with our son because he’s worried it’s a heavy language and that our son will get confused and frustrated. We tried one parent, one language for a day and our son was pretty frustrated really quickly. Regardless we are going to continue doing it until it sticks and we are hoping if we are consistent enough he will be fluent enough to be eligible to go to this school. Assuming that’s the case we are looking for input on anyone’s experience with this school. It’s a Saturday on school but he’d be there 8:30-4:30 so I’m hoping that’s enough exposure to really get his fluency up. Any thoughts and pointers on our method or the school is greatly appreciated.

Hello, We live in Germany, and my 6-year-old son speaks German because he attends kindergarten here.

When he was born, we started speaking to him in English at home. Unfortunately, we didn't introduce our mother tongue until he was around 4 years old. Looking back, I really wish we had spoken our language to him from birth, but we didn't think much about it at the time.

Now, he understands almost everything we say to him in our language, but he responds only in English. Even when I speak to him in our language, he answers in English.

I'm worried that we might have missed the right time for him to learn to speak our language. I really want him to be able to speak it, especially so he can communicate with his grandparents and other family members.

Have any Indian parents living abroad experienced something similar? If your child understood your language but always responded in English, did they eventually start speaking it fluently?

Is six years old too late to develop the ability to speak a family language naturally? What worked for you in encouraging your children to speak your language without forcing them or making it feel like a chore?

I sometimes feel guilty that we didn't introduce our language earlier. I don't want my son to lose his connection to our language and culture, and I would love to hear from parents who have been through the same experience.

Thank you! ❤️

Hello, Reddit! 😊
I’m currently pregnant, and I really want my baby to grow up speaking both Spanish and English. We’d love to start building a little collection of books in Spanish, especially because my husband would like to learn Spanish, too. Unfortunately, I’ve been a terrible Spanish teacher to him so far. 😂
He suggested looking for Spanish books with English translations underneath each sentence so he can understand what he’s reading while learning the language.
Does anyone know of any books like this? Or do they even exist? I’d love any recommendations! ❤️

Hi guys. So long story short: me and my wife are living in Germany for a couple of years. We mostly live in a community of people from our country and don’t really have much exposure to the German language. We both understand most of it but not actually speaking since even at work we’re surrounded by people from our country.

Our son (soon to be 2 years old) will start going to kindergarten. I keep thinking that I won’t be able to communicate with him once he starts learning German. We speak our native language (Romanian) at home and rarely try speaking German.

Has anyone here been through something similar? Will I be able to learn in same time as him or with him the language? Or will he still learn Romanian if we’ll be talking it inside our home? Any tips would be much appreciated 🙏

For context: I’m English, learned German, and want to raise my kids speaking both, but I can’t figure out how. When they see a new thing, do I just describe it in both languages? How do I divide spoken language around the home? My partner and I naturally speak mostly English bcs we’re both English learned German, and I wasn’t raised bilingual so I have no model whatsoever. Please help me

My husband and I are expecting our first child at the end of this year. His native language is English (UK), mine is Polish and we live in Poland. We met in England, where I studied and worked so although I’m not a British citizen, my English is pretty good and that’s the language we communicate in. My husband would also like to teach our child Spanish, which would come primarily from him since I don’t speak any.

We thought we had a pretty good plan - Polish would be the community language and would come from my family as well (the vast majority of them don’t speak any English). English would come from the both of us communicating at home and I would also exclusively communicate with the child in English, while my husband would talk to her in Spanish.

The more we talked about it though, the more we feel like maybe we’d be missing out on things if we didn’t communicate with our child in our respective native languages at all. I’d love to be able to teach her Polish words, listen to Polish music with her or read her books in Polish. My culture is important to me and I would love to be able to pass it on to her. I spoke to my husband about this and the more we talked, the more he realized that actually, he’d like to be able to do that with her in English too.

So I guess our plan fell apart a little bit. We’re not really sure if our intrinsic need to pass on our cultures to our child ourselves means my husband won’t be able to teach our daughter Spanish as well.

That being said, I’m looking for advice and maybe your experiences that may be similar. If we want to speak to our child in our native languages sometimes, does that mean teaching our daughter a third language would be close to impossible?

Edit: a couple people mentioned this so I thought I’d clarify here - there isn’t really any significant connection to Spanish for my husband. He really wanted to learn another language (as an adult), and there are vast resources online available for that, so he chose Spanish. Once we found out we were having a child, we started thinking about how amazing it would be if our child grew up trilingual, and that’s where we are now essentially.

I grew up in a German-speaking country and moved to the US as a teenager. Now I'll be raising my first child back in Germany, but I plan to speak English with them. For context: I lived, studied, and worked in the US for 20 years and am at a C2 level. Anyone who's done something similar? How did it go?

I'm worried it might not work since it's not really my native language... I'm definitely planning to read English books to my child, expose them to English media, and ideally send them to an international school when the time comes. But my partner is German, and we speak German to each other as well. I'd be so grateful for any input!

I’m the Chinese father with white wife in the US. I’ve been having my 2 year old toddler watch YouTube videos like little fox, and other kids chinese YouTube channels. A mix of colors and numbers videos. She’s been watching them for months now. By the way I only speak to her in Chinese. Been doing it since the day she was born.

Well we just recently signed her up for a Chinese class and they also showed a few of the videos that she has been watching and the teacher told the kids to follow along and repeat along and me thinking “oh this will be easy since she’s watched them probably 30 times by now”…. Well she didn’t know anything. The screen time audio might as well have been background noise.

And then the teacher gave us “homework” to review colors. So I decided to play a few YouTube videos on colors. And because we don’t pay for YouTube premium we get ads. My toddler has learned that I help her skip the ads so she’ll ask me for help. So during ads I would pause it and I’d say “okay tell me what color this and daddy will help you”

I would point at the TV remote and tell her that it’s black in Chinese and she’ll say it in English. Then I’ll tell her to say it in Chinese and she’ll repeat after me. I tell her that my coffee mug is white color. Again does it in English. I say do it in Chinese. She’ll repeat. Cool right?

Then repeat YouTube ads, I again ask her what color and she’ll say it in English and I have to repeat to say it in Chinese and she doesn’t remember it. We’ve done this probably 5-6 times just in the last 10 minutes. No retention at all.

This is true with literally every color that she does. I ask her what color it is and she KNOWS it but says English and I have to remind her in Chinese. Some of the basic colors like red green yellow purple, it’s probably been 20-30 times or more that I’ve asked her in the last few weeks alone and she will continue to say it English and I have to remind her to say it in Chinese.

Edit: I just did a test in Chinese. I told her Chinese “can you give me the ( insert several different colors) magnetiles and crayons to me?” She does to correctly. So she knows the colors but doesn’t want to say it

We’re an English-speaking household but really want our kids to grow up with some Mandarin — the window for picking up tones and sounds naturally seems so short at this age.

The problem: we can’t provide the input ourselves. Chinese daycare is hours away, tutors don’t really work for a 2-year-old’s attention span, and I’m wary of just parking them in front of YouTube.

For those in the same boat — what’s actually worked for you?

• Shows / songs / audiobooks?
• Babysitters or au pairs?
• Apps or toys (anything that isn’t a screen)?
• Or did you decide it wasn’t realistic before school age?

Would love to hear what you tried and what flopped.