r/multilingualparenting

My toddler just turned 3, our community language English but I speak Mandarin with her at home OPOL. I’m a colloquially fluent heritage speaker not a native speaker, and we don’t live close to my family/I’m her primary exposure, so I have some anxiety around if her language progression is “normal.”

A few things I noticed recently that I was curious if these are typical:

1. While she’s been very talkative in both languages compared to school mates since she turned 2, she did not have accurate tones until probably 2.5 or so. Even now there are some specific words or phrases where she uses wrong tone, some of which she got correct before.
2. She recently has started making some grammatical mistakes she never made before such as using 不 where she should use 沒. It might coincide with moving to big kid bed, or being sick, not sure?
3. when she says something incorrectly as toddlers do, I will often gently repeat back to her correctly. However, recently she will respond by getting frustrated and saying “no mommy! That’s wrong!,” repeating the incorrect grammar and trying to make me say it too.

Did your kids go through this phase? Any advice for gentle correction?

We recently decided to transition to an American daycare after having a Russian speaking nanny for financial reasons. No family in town so just me...not any Russian speaking families in our area either.

I automatically just speak English since I grew up in the states but call my folks in Russian over the phone. My little one is 20 months. Unfortunately, even if we video call, they aren't speaking to him except to say his name.... "Hey, X! Look at babushka! Hey X! X! X!"

Its been 2 months and I have seen his language skills go down that he doesn't recognize the questions he used to know the answers to. I'm so upset. I gave my paycheck to this nanny till I literally went broke....

Now I'm not sure how to support him myself or switch ot the Russian speaking conversation when I literally speak English all day at work or with hubby.

I know when he gets a little older and we introduce screen time, we will be watching old Russian cartoons. But its sooo hard to do this alone. I found a Russian toddler class about 30 min away that starts in September on Sunday mornings for about an hour.

I miss NY where there was a large community and family who would enrich him with my language and culture.

Any advice when you are alone and at that young age? I wish I could have kept the nanny, honestly....

My daughter is 2.5 years old she is half Mexican and half korean. My husband is korean and i think its is important for her to know korean and Spanish as well as english . I mostly speak to her in english and read to her in Spanish so she has picked up some basics . I am a stay at home mom my husband is usually busy with work so he doest really speak to my daughter in korean because of it he finds it easier to just speak to her in english so she understands. She knows basic like grandma, grandpa hello in korean ect .i recently im try to teach her myself more basics like counting colors and shapes but my own korean is limited i would appreciate any recommendations or tips .

Hello, I have a 2 year old daughter who is talking all the time, the problem is we don’t understand her ! We live in Sweden, so her dad speaks Swedish and I speak Turkish to her. We speak English with my husband. I’m learning Swedish as well so in social situations I speak Swedish mostly.

Now she says maybe 15 words which we understand mixed with Turkish-Swedish, but the rest we have no idea what she is saying. And she gets really frustrated when we don’t understand her.

What do you guys think ? Should I get some help for her speech or should I be okey with 15 words we can understand and wait a bit more. Thank you.

Needing advice on this topic. My eldest kid speaks my native tongue as he was raised back home. My second one doesnt, can only understand a few words. He was up until he started going to childcare. He’s 6 now and i find its too late? Im pregnant again and i really want to do it seriously. I know speaking to the baby in my native tongue all the time. But does anyone have any tips? Its hard because theres not much material online like kids videos as my language is a dialect from a small island in my country. So not as much available in terms of that.

Me and my two partners are expecting our first child in a few months.

Each of us is multilingual and we'd like for our child to grow up with some of our native languages as well.

I grew up speaking both German and English.

My boyfriend grew up speaking Urdu, Hebrew and English, but he also speaks German, ASL, French, and Spanish.

My girlfriend grew up speaking Farsi and Hebrew, but she can also speak English, French, Arabic, German, and Spanish.

We live in the US, so the community language will obviously be English, and that is also the language we usually talk in.

For now our plan is to do OPOL, with each parent picking one of our native languages to talk to our child.

An issue we have with that is that we'd have to leave out one of our native languages, so we think that it would be nice for our child to learn all five. But we're unsure, because we've received conflicting information on whether or not it's possible to raise a kid to speak five languages fluently. Do any of you know more about that? We're also aware that adding another language would be a lot more work, because then one parent would need to speak two languages to our child.

Another question we have is if it's better for us to continue speaking English with each other so our child can pick it up from the start, or if we should rely on community exposure and focus on our minority languages at home.

So my husband and I live in an English speaking country. I am a native spanish speaker and he is fluent in it too, so we decided to speak spanish to our children. No one around us speaks Spanish besides 2 people which we see occasionally. It's been challenging not to switch to English in social situations, but we have successfully taught them to understand spanish (not speaking completely yet though). We do all the things recommended, songs, books and screen time in Spanish and we also have contact with my spanish speaking family via videocalls.

Somehow my husband is concerned his accent when he speaks spanish might confuse the kids, is this true or possible? Since the parents are the only Spanish speakers they know, we want to know how much it affects their language development when one parent is not a native speaker but still is really fluent. The kids understand him when he speaks so I am not concerned about them not understanding the language. It's mostly and accent concern. Any experiences or info on this?

Hi all, I’d love some advice on our language set up as our toddler has become very chatty and increasingly interested in communicating with others that don’t speak the minority language.

My partner and I have two kids, one is 2.5 and we have a new baby. We live in the US and are fluent in Spanish (partner is a heritage speaker and I’ve learned in school + living abroad) but our dominant language is English. Since our first was born we have spoken to her in Spanish almost all of the time, and speak to each other in English most of the time. We do read books to her in both languages, and sometimes substitute words or phrases in English if we don’t know the word in Spanish, or a phrase just feels more fitting to our English-dominant brains (ex. Oopsie, yucky, yummy yummy in my tummy, night night, etc.). She is also in a Spanish immersion daycare 3x/week where staff exclusively speak Spanish but many of her classmates primarily speak English, which she picks up phrases and words from.

Our social life is basically entirely in English. We use English with our friends and family, though many have basic Spanish and will speak to her in Spanish in whatever limited capacity they’re able to. Her Spanish-speaking grandparents don’t live close by but we talk to them every couple weeks. They also speak English, but mostly speak to her in Spanish because they understand what we’re trying to do.

Now that our daughter is 2.5 she talks a lot! And she almost exclusively speaks Spanish which is great as it’s the target language. BUT we’ve noticed she seems frustrated that her English js limited and she can’t communicate as much with English-only speakers like her cousins for example. She only feels confident with certain phrases and vocab (“I want x”, “it fell”) etc., and as people are telling a story or laugh at something someone said she often says “Que pasó?”.

We are torn on whether we should start introducing English more, and if so, how. We don’t want her to feel excluded socially, but also don’t want English to completely take over as we’ve seen happen for many kids.

Anyways, what would you do? Stay strong in Spanish and allow her to just kinda figure out English little by little? Or ramp up English in some sort of structured way to prevent her from feeling excluded in social situations?

Thank you!