mjmichaels
New member
I have always loved coming here for advice and reading all your experiences. Here is ours so far.
We are living in Australia, Mum native English speaker, Dad native Spanish speaker, German is a family heritage language and we are both trilingual in all 3, though German is the weakest language for us both.
Before our baby was born we decided to go with Minority language at home strategy to boost Spanish as much as possible. Spanish is now our default language with baby and we used it right from birth. English we are leaving to the community to teach - she has recently started attending daycare in English.
One thing I really wasn't sure about was how and when to introduce German. Originally I had hoped to travel to see family when she was around 8 months and introduce it then. Well covid happened so no international travel for us. During lockdown I decided to implement a daily "German hour" of fun, games, singing and nursery rhymes in German. I open the session every day by singing a "hello" song and when we are finished I sing a "goodbye" song. So that is one way I try to separate the languages. I never thought we would have to be her primary source of both Spanish and German. We have also recently started doing Saturday as a "German day" which has been great, the longer time period means we use even more varied vocab. Both of us speak German to her and to each other when we are having German time. We have some special toys that only "speak" German which we play with together during German time.
Fortunately with covid cases under control our daughter will soon be able to attend a German playgroup once a week and will get input from native speakers. This has been one of my concerns since we are advanced speakers but do still make mistakes. We want to keep using German together as a family because there is a chance we will abruptly move back to a German speaking environment. It is also culturally important for us to keep alive.
I'm curious to hear about similar experiences. I've read about the 30% rule of exposure or around 25 hours a week minimum. Our daughter is currently getting around 35 hours English, 40 in Spanish and 18 in German per week. So it follows our priorities currently that Spanish and English are more important to us as a family. I can see calculating it that she may not end up fluent in German, but I'd be really happy if she has a strong foundation that will be easy to build on. We are also using baby signs with her (same signs for each concept, whichever language we're speaking at the time).
It's been very exciting because she is using two signs and is saying 4 words in Spanish. I was expecting her to take a while to sort everything out, but she's really shocked me with 6 words at 9 months. It feels so natural to speak Spanish to her that I keep accidentally talking to other kids (and dogs!) in Spanish at the park
As a non-native speaker of both Spanish and German I put plenty of time in learning nursery rhymes and baby vocab. If your level isn't quite there for full time language it's easy to make it into a fun hour daily. Ideally she would see more family and friends who speak the languages natively but right now we have to make do with video calls. I'm working on improving my own skills and making as many fun situations with the languages as possible.
We are living in Australia, Mum native English speaker, Dad native Spanish speaker, German is a family heritage language and we are both trilingual in all 3, though German is the weakest language for us both.
Before our baby was born we decided to go with Minority language at home strategy to boost Spanish as much as possible. Spanish is now our default language with baby and we used it right from birth. English we are leaving to the community to teach - she has recently started attending daycare in English.
One thing I really wasn't sure about was how and when to introduce German. Originally I had hoped to travel to see family when she was around 8 months and introduce it then. Well covid happened so no international travel for us. During lockdown I decided to implement a daily "German hour" of fun, games, singing and nursery rhymes in German. I open the session every day by singing a "hello" song and when we are finished I sing a "goodbye" song. So that is one way I try to separate the languages. I never thought we would have to be her primary source of both Spanish and German. We have also recently started doing Saturday as a "German day" which has been great, the longer time period means we use even more varied vocab. Both of us speak German to her and to each other when we are having German time. We have some special toys that only "speak" German which we play with together during German time.
Fortunately with covid cases under control our daughter will soon be able to attend a German playgroup once a week and will get input from native speakers. This has been one of my concerns since we are advanced speakers but do still make mistakes. We want to keep using German together as a family because there is a chance we will abruptly move back to a German speaking environment. It is also culturally important for us to keep alive.
I'm curious to hear about similar experiences. I've read about the 30% rule of exposure or around 25 hours a week minimum. Our daughter is currently getting around 35 hours English, 40 in Spanish and 18 in German per week. So it follows our priorities currently that Spanish and English are more important to us as a family. I can see calculating it that she may not end up fluent in German, but I'd be really happy if she has a strong foundation that will be easy to build on. We are also using baby signs with her (same signs for each concept, whichever language we're speaking at the time).
It's been very exciting because she is using two signs and is saying 4 words in Spanish. I was expecting her to take a while to sort everything out, but she's really shocked me with 6 words at 9 months. It feels so natural to speak Spanish to her that I keep accidentally talking to other kids (and dogs!) in Spanish at the park
As a non-native speaker of both Spanish and German I put plenty of time in learning nursery rhymes and baby vocab. If your level isn't quite there for full time language it's easy to make it into a fun hour daily. Ideally she would see more family and friends who speak the languages natively but right now we have to make do with video calls. I'm working on improving my own skills and making as many fun situations with the languages as possible.
especially if you are there to join in. One advantage I've found about starting young is that it gives you some time to build up your vocab and skills before your baby can outpace you.