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@watcherkohen Does your kid like listening to music and singing? Our 3-year-old loves listening to songs for kids (and even songs not for kids, sometimes) and spends a good portion of her time at home singing to herself (things she's heard and songs of her own invention). For us, this has been...

@emmalove Ha, "agua" was practically our daughter's first word, too, even before "papá" (Daddy). Now she's in a phase where she says "agua" to talk about all sorts of things: rain outside, the umbrellas people use in the rain, a puddle or any body of water in a picture book, something wet...

@aldredian Wow, that must have been wonderful to see that moment when he suddenly switched to being bilingual. Just today our daughter started saying "kitty cat" (English) to complement what was previously her primary word "gata" (Spanish) for cats. Seeing how my daughter develops I suspect...

@kilroy59 Thanks for sharing all this! Your son seems to have been learning to produce words a little earlier than our daughter but there's a lot of variation among kids this way. I also have been doing a "language diary" thing occasionally, but as a busy parent it's hard to find time to record...

@johnskat Ha! Well, no harm in trying to ask again in the other language just to see what happens, I guess. Amazing how kids learn these things so intuitively.

@seeker112 Thanks for sharing. Our kid is also just now beginning to learn to use pronouns, which is an interesting process. At first she would point to herself and say "tú" (which is "you" in Spanish) when she meant to say "me," but now she seems to have just learned to use "tú" correctly...

@barsomo Yes, both of us (her mother and I) speak both languages, though I have been trying to speak just English to her when we're having a private conversation to ensure she hears a lot of the minority language from a native speaker. Somehow speaking to her in English when there's non-English...

@newbelieverinchrist First, a general remark: keep in mind that there is a tremendous amount of individual variation in when children (even "normal," typically-developing ones) hit standard milestones which aren't reflected in simple categorical statements like "your kid should do ____ by 24...

@laxdax Interesting! Perhaps because of my daughter's particular upbringing, where it's clear to her that both her parents are bilingual, she's been slower to develop that kind of situational linguistic awareness -- maybe she's still assuming that *everyone* in her life is bilingual? But she's...

@eblemons103 I second all of this! While it's nice to teach your kid a minority language, making sure everyone in the household is happy, not too stressed, and just generally OK is about three orders of magnitude more urgent than trying to optimize how your baby can learn German right now. If...

I'm curious about other people's personal experiences with this. And how did it go for your kid(s) -- did they slowly start adding "extra" words in the other language one at a time (so one day they were saying only "dog", then the next they were saying "perro" and "dog" interchangeably)? Or was...

@anlytcphil I'd like to reaffirm what others have said here, that having good communication with your toddler's daycare teachers is the most important thing (so at least they know to respect her multilingual background), and add some personal experiences. Our daughter is 25 mo. old and just...