Growing up Multilingual
It is a fact that kids generally pick up a language faster than adults: they simply grasp more words in a day than their parents. While we adults seek out intensive courses, conversation classes and many other ways to learn a language – and make efforts to speak it – our children are already speaking the local language within a month or two of moving to a new country.
Fast learners
Whenever there’s a discussion on bilingual or multilingual kids, I am reminded of this little story my friend shared with me. My Canadian journalist colleague/friend had moved to Amsterdam a year before I did. Though we both were on the English team, we wanted to integrate into Dutch society. I had taken a two-month intensive course before joining my new workplace. Though I understood the language, I found it difficult to speak, and I wanted to understand how he was coping with it. My friend said that he had thought he could practice his Dutch with his three-year-old daughter, who was enrolled in a local playschool in Amsterdam. But she refused to speak to him in Dutch and always switched to English, saying that he was too slow for her!
It’s been a somewhat similar story with my own three-year-old daughter. She knows more German words and sentences than I do, but she never speaks German to me. Her teacher tells me that she speaks in German to her but will not try it with me, as she knows that is not my language. But there are times when she simply uses words from other languages she has picked up – not only German, but also Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, and a bit of French, mixed in with our mother tongue Tamil.
Multilingual background
Both my husband and I were brought up in a multilingual environment in India: we spoke Tamil at home and English at school. And as we moved with our parents within India to different cities, wherever their jobs took them, we were introduced to many more languages – that is to say, the local language of each state. In my case, I learnt a bit of Kashmiri, Hindi and Marathi as I moved from Jammu to New Delhi to Mumbai, and then to my hometown Tamil Nadu, where I learnt how to write my mother tongue, Tamil.
Learning the new language along with your little ones
But growing up in India is very different from growing up in Europe. So when we had our first daughter in Amsterdam, we were learning about life with a newborn; as she grew we spoke more English to her than Tamil, thinking that that would help her to communicate when she started making friends and meeting new people. As we were still learning Dutch, speaking it to our child did not make sense to us. And then we moved to Switzerland. It is only after we had our second baby that we realized that for kids picking up a language really can be a non-issue.
Here are some of the things that have helped our daughters to pick up Swiss German and other languages:
- Sending them to bilingual schools: We began by sending our older daughter twice a week to a bilingual daycare. As we live in Zurich, the daycare has English and German as its languages.We did this for a year. By the time she was three, she was already fluent in English, as she spoke it at home and at daycare. She had also picked up many words in German. She now goes to two playschools – a German Spielgruppe twice a week and an English playgroup thrice a week. Our younger one will soon follow the same pattern, beginning with the new session in August.
- Reading bilingual books: Helping children with reading in the local language and English also helps children pick up more words. For instance, we recently introduced our girls to the Usborne collection of bilingual word books. The German book, for example, is a fun presentation of words in English and German and a picture to go with each word. The book also groups the words into different categories like animals/Tiere, family and friends/Familie und Freunde, colours, numbers, and verbs. The book has also helped us as parents to build our vocabulary with these themes. That’s how I learnt that the German word Krake means octopus, and a Fledermaus is not a mouse but rather a bat! Enrolled at the local library in our area, we pick up books that have big bold letters and nice big pictures that help us read the stories to them in German.
- Watching cartoons in many languages: There are many cartoon series that can help children pick up a language in a fun way. My girls wave to each other many times a day, saying “Ni Hao,“ which is hello in Mandarin Chinese. They picked this up watching the cartoon series “Ni Hao Kai Lan” – one of three bilingual series aired on Nick Junior. Each episode of the series revolves around a little girl named Kai Lan and her friends who speak in English and introduce their viewers to Chinese language, values and cultures. Watching with them, I have learnt that Yeye means Grandpa in Chinese.
The other day my daughter was counting in Spanish and she told me, “Dora counts ‘Uno, dos, tres’!” “Dora the Explorer” is popular among kids ages three and seven, too! The series has taught my girls many Spanish words. A similar series, “Go Diego Go,” is also an activity-packed show in English and uses Spanish words.
“Peppa Pig” has many episodes that focus on languages and cultures of different countries and how Peppa and her friends communicate with each other. For example, in one episode Peppa’s French pen pal Delphine Donkey visits her, and the episode features a lullaby in French.
- Apps that help you learn new languages: Kids are quick learners, especially when it comes to using their little fingers to swipe across a screen and play games on iPad or Android tablets. Controlled exposure to apps on electronic devices can help in building children’s vocabulary. We do simple ones similar to books, with just picture-and-word flashcards. There are also advanced ones available for older kids, like the interactive “JustKidsApps” for children over eight years of age. If you live in Switzerland then this might be the right app for your kids. The app has been reviewed here.
- YouTube: Last but not least, one of the very best ways to learn rhymes and words and stories in a new language is through YouTube. One can choose from many options that come up when you search for learning language songs or stories for kids. Through one of the playlists, my girls learnt the Japanese version of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” – kira kira hikaru osorano hoshiyo and can sing correctly, pronouncing all the Japanese words. Another example is the YouTube channel “Learn with Me,” an interactive channel for children aged two to six. Their playlist features ABCs, alphabet characters, colors and numbers in many languages. My girls are currently learning with the German series of “Learn with Me.”
Switzerland is a country with people from all over the world. Even if your kids go to Swiss schools, they will encounter people from different countries and cultures, and they will grow up learning together in one of the Swiss languages – German, French, Italian or Romansh. For this reason, it makes no sense to me that my kids are watching a cartoon with Spanish words. They might never use them. However, they don’t watch for the language, but rather for the character; in the process, they learn new words from a different language. Exposing our kids to many languages and cultures will help them grow to become confident kids in a multilingual environment.
By Keerthana Nagarajan
Keerthana Nagarajan is a freelance journalist and lives with her husband and two little girls in Zurich. Keerthana worked previously in the Netherlands at Radio Netherlands Worldwide, covering South Asia news, and at CNN’s sister concern in India, CNN-IBN, a 24-hour news channel. Here’s the link to all her published content: http://keerthananagarajan.blogspot.in
Illustration by Sharanya Mageshwaran
Sharanya Mageshwaran is a stay-at-home mom of a very naughty three-year-old who speaks better German than her mother does. Before moving to Zurich, Sharanya was a pharmaceutical research scientist in India. She loves painting and sketching with fauvist expressionist abstract themes. More of her artwork can be see here: http://somelightandcolor.blogspot.ch/
I enjoyed reading this article very much, thank you for all your efforts! Am a primary school teacher at a bilingual school. I also grew up bilingual. Most scientific research surrounding language acquisition and learning implies that being bilingual increases your potential to learning. However it is important to take into consideration that academically, children need a basis. What that means, is that if you are bilingual at home and your child attends a monolingual school his or her academic language strengths will be on the language being taught. German is not an easy language and has a very complex grammar. If you want children to also be proficient in the other language, they need some kind of formal instruction on it. My best regards to all the contributors at Mothering Matters! Nelly
Hi Nelly,
Thank you for your comment. great to know that you enjoyed the article.
Funny, our three year old is entirely different! We are both Australian and he goes to a Swiss daycare two days a week (has since he was 16 months) largely for language immersion. Now he spends all day asking me to speak German to him and wanting to speak German to me. I am the one that has to tell him that I won’t speak German with him, though he heard me speak it in other circumstances, as I speak English, as I am worried he will pick up bad skills from me. I only started learning when we came here and am perhaps at the very beginning of B1 level, so nowhere near fluent. It feels wrong to stop him, though, when it is something he is so excited about practicing, so I tell him that he can speak German to me and I will speak English back. Do you have any advice for this kind of situation?
Hi Joanna, It’s great that he’s so motivated to speak German but I don’t think you should be the one to do it. Perhaps find German speaking friends outside of daycare to speak with him, or neighbours or get a German-speaking teen to come and babysit / play with him. At this age, you really need this important stage in his language development to be about fluent acquisition of his first language. The second language is important if you’re staying here but not at the expense of his first language. And you can take him to something like MuKi singing, ie- Mutter-Kind singing where the instructor is doing the speaking / singing in German (usually Swiss-German). That way you’ll learn something too and you might make a new friend for your son. Or, if you really do want to speak German with him, say you’ll only do it for a set time every day, ie- at Breakfast only, we’ll speak German. Or you’ll read him one German book from the library per day. All the best with it!
That’s a neat write up. Very true. Our kids easily adapt to a multilingual environment. All we can do is to provide them with the resources to grow and thrive in it. That way this article is quite helpful. Nice illustration too.
thank you for you comments Viola. good to know that you enjoyed reading the article