Raising a baby in a trilingual family

[lamarcook]

We live in the US so the child will pick up English in daily life.
We speak Spanish at home.
My mother tongue is Polish though I have now lived outside of Poland the majority of my life and I no longer consider myself “fluent” (I only use it when I speak to my family on average once a week for a couple of hours).

I do speak Polish to my baby but I’m worried that a) he will learn only rudimentary/ “bad” Polish from me and will be all confused b) it will mess him up that mum is switching languages on the fly (ie say something to him in Polish and then repeat the same in Spanish for the benefit of his dad) and it will negatively impact our communication (him not knowing which language to use when speaking with me and being reluctant to do so).

I don’t want to be an overachiever mum and be sending him to both Polish and Spanish language schools though I do believe that’s the way he could learn the grammar and compartmentalize the languages.

Thoughts and tips are appreciated

 

[aldredian]

@lamarcook I have many friends who have become rusty with their mother tongue in adulthood and then forced themselves to speak it again once they have children.

The result is their mother tongue improves until it became natural again and their children can speak both their mother tongue and the community language.

When you first start off, it may be unnatural. That's ok. If you forget something, look it up. The thing is, with time, it'll get easier. And it doesn't matter if they pick up "bad" Polish". Better than none.

The thing is, there were times I've read certain characters wrong and then I find out later. No biggie. I just tell my son. "Oh, mummy read that wrong. It's actually this." That's it. There's no big deal.

Don't let perfection get in the way of progress.

As for repeating in Spanish, that's really no big deal. That's what I do.

I only speak Mandarin to my son. My husband actually listens fairly intently to what we say and at this point (son's almost 4), he actually understands the vast majority of what we say these days. But if I do have to translate for my husband, I do. I just make sure I only speak Mandarin to our son.

Kids don't get confused. They can tell you're using a different language. My son has never been confused. He easily switches between languages depending who he's speaking to. It's fine.

Just do OPOL. Your husband speaks Spanish, you speak Polish. The community will provide English for your child. This is a very common setup for trilingual families.

 

[noname1]

@aldredian Perfectly said. My Hakka has actually improved since talking to my daughter in it. And I actively look up the dictionary if I have to as well. And my daughter speaks back to me in Hakka so it is a head start even though I also struggle with particular topic vocab e.g. politics

 

[barsomo]

@lamarcook I’ve been in your situation! I’m from Finland and I spent several years not speaking my language actively until I had kids. I have a Brazilian husband that I speak English with and we live in French speaking Canada. Long story short, we struggled to speak our languages to our kids at first, but after the initial difficulties, we managed to do it and it has paid off; both kids can understand and speak 4 languages, with Finnish and Portuguese being their strongest. Don’t worry about your Polish or your kid hearing you switching languages! If you always only speak Polish to him, then in all likelihood he will speak it to you as well. You will only know if you try

We have a podcast where we talk about our multilingual parenting journey and we actually have an episode where we talk about finding it hard to speak our native languages: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-language-experiment/id1695186161?i=1000623664480

Good luck

 

[kneephite]

@lamarcook please talk to your child in your native language, even if it is rusty! If he/she will want to get better in future they will
Polish is hard language and your child can only benefit from having access to it.
We raise our children in trilingual family (I speak Polish my partner Luxembourgish, we talk to each other in English).and our 2.5 year old is not confused at all. She knows which things mommy says and which daddy. She also does great with English as she listens to it too (and lately she's been attending English speaking nursery) . She enjoys reading (us reading of course;p) in all three languages and doesn't even mind stories in German and French (as those are other languages than she is surrounded bt in this country). I've met dad with Polish background who was asking me or typing stories to Google Translate to learn how to say things in Polish so he can read and teach his children. His two beautiful daugtherrs were talking beautiful 3 year old level Polish with funny accent and I think they will appreciate in future that they have this up their sleeve

 

[xoana]

@lamarcook Oh, funny! We’re Lithuanian, English (my partner), Spanish (our nanny). We live in US, kids attend Spanish immersion schools, and we spend every summer in Lithuania. Kids speak all three languages, but left alone usually revert to English.