How to Raise Your Kids to Speak 4 Languages Fluently
What worked for our family
Our son Anton speaks all 4 languages now at 5.5 years old. Our daughter Adriana is 20 months old and she is learning new words every day.
Why did we choose to raise multilingual kids?
Because we wanted our kids to talk to grandparents!
My family is multiracial. My wife is Vietnamese, and I was born and raised in USSR. We met and married in Singapore. I agree, it sounds complicated. Let me promise to tell you this story one day.
Our son was born in Singapore. I wondered how to teach him languages. All four grandparents don’t speak English. The same goes for most of the other close relatives. We even had to organize separate weddings because of that.
We decided to teach our babies as many languages as we could. It was 3 back then, English, Vietnamese and Russian. Three years ago we moved to Serbia, and it took my son 3 months to learn Serbian as a 4th language. He speaks 4 languages now.
Learning languages as an adult is a challenge. You need a lot of effort to get the right pronunciation, learn vocabulary, and study grammar. It takes time and practice to become fluent in a language.
Babies are different, they absorb languages. Language is a small part of the information they get about the world. It doesn’t make a lot of difference how many languages to learn.
Advantages of raising multilingual kids:
- better attention control since 6 months of age
- a faster pace of learning any language
- you give them a head start since birth
How did we do it?
The right way to raise a multilingual baby? Speak all the languages you want your baby to learn. That limits your choice down to languages spoken in your family.
There are exceptions to this rule. One of my students is a Singaporean Chinese lady with a British husband. They teach their son English, Mandarin Chinese, and Indonesian. It helps that their helper is Indonesian. You need a native speaker around if you want a language you don’t speak.
Our family language rules are simple. English is the official language of communication. What kind of conversations do we use it for? When every family member around needs to understand what’s going on. When my wife wants to talk to our kids, she uses Vietnamese. I use Russian in the same situations. Our son speaks Serbian with our neighbours and at the kindergarten.
We made this decision together as parents. We stick to the rules since the birth of our first kid. We have children's books in 4 languages at home. The same goes for cartoons and movies. YouTube makes the latter easy these days.
What are the challenges?
- get used to hearing conversations in your family you don’t understand.
- you have to talk to your kids a lot
- you need to have books in all languages you need.
- reading takes more time every day.
A small price if you ask me.
Summary
Your kids will speak multiple languages if you
- talk to your kids in all languages your family speaks or get a native speaker
- have clear rules for using different languages in family conversations
- get books in all languages for your home library
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