How can i teach my child Polish language? (I'm Russian, my wife is Polish)

♂

Aug 20, 11, 12:12 #31

Hi there,
I'm a Scot, my wife's Polish. We have a 4 1/2 yr old daughter who is quite happily multi lingual.
My wife speaks almost exclusively Polish to her, I speak almost exclusively English to her with a fair smattering of Scots.
My sister is teaching her French as well as working on the written side of language.
It's working, she can switch happily between languages and doesn't seem to get at all confused.
I don't buy the idea that more than one language is too much for a child, from experience I can say that's just nonsense.
A child's brain is like a sponge, mine is more like a brick ;)

♀

Aug 20, 11, 22:16 #32

From what I have experienced there are no problems with multiple languages, but there isn't a 'quick fix' either. It seems that children from multi-language households tend to learn to speak later but when they do it is in all the 'home' languages - I have a friend who is Polish and her husband is Spanish - They speak Spanish at home between them. Mom only talked Polish to the kids from birth and dad only Spanish. Now they are 6 & 4 and it doesn't matter what language the parent uses, they will always answer mom in Polish and dad in Spanish LOL.

I have other friends who are American, but mom is Spanish and dad is German - Mom spoke equal Spanish and English to the kids and dad spoke German and English to the kids from birth (they would say something thing in their native language and then repeat it in english when talking to them) and now at the age of 9 and 7 both children study equally in all three languages - They are a little bit behind their peers, but from what I understand, apparently this is quite common when they can do it in so many languages (more than 2), and their parents have been told that this is nothing to be concerned about.

I also have a friend from England who was told by a professional to only speak one language to their child until he was 3, then introduce the second one. They chose to only use English until he was 3, and then they moved to Poland and have been trying to introduce Polish to him for the last 18 months. He has been very slow to pick it up, even with going for a few hours a day a Polish school. He seems to be resisting using it.

In our household we only speak English, but both of our kids have been going all day to a Polish school since they were 3. It took about 2 years for each of them to become fluent in Polish (spending about 50% of their day immersed in Polish), but they can only converse/understand things that they come accross at school. I think it would be much more beneficial if we could talk Polish to our kids in our day to day lives to give them a wider scope of the language, but unfortunately our kids know more Polish than we do.

Dino Lingo	Feb 12, 12, 00:30 #33
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