Expectant mamas hoping to give their children the best springboard into life often use in-utero techniques like the Ritmo Prenatal or BabyPlus and continue to teach them the ABCs and 123s once out of the womb. Their wee brains are like sponges, soaking up bits and pieces that could make a college student green with envy. Parents skilled in multiple languages are smart to teach their youngsters the different tongues early on, giving them a strong language base from which they can grow.
Elin and Tiger Woods are making sure their babes know Swedish and English while Jessica Alba is tossing Spanish words like gato and pato out to her daughter Honor. The doting mother said:
I am a mother who shoves information down her throat, poor thing. . . . I sing her songs about colors in Spanish and English when I'm cooking. . . . So now she kind of points to blue and says "azul" and I say "Yes, azul, muy bien!" It's slow-going but she's sort of picking it up.
Do you have a bilingual babe?
Source: WireImage
Paul's Boutique
Stuart Weitzman
Serfontaine
my son actually understand French and English and speaks some words,but that's because he has too,i'm french and his dad is american,and now that his dad and i aren't together anymore and my bf is a french guy living in England,my son mostly hears both language around the house.
1My daughter is fluent in English and Spanish. My son not so much only English, he sounds so cute when he attempts to speak Spanish.
2I don't have kids but I wish my dad would have taught me Spanish when I was younger. There was two reasons he didn't teach me. 1 my mom doesn't speak spanish, and two when he went to school they weren't allowed to speak spanish. I live in a Hispanic community and not knowing Spanish can be a problem sometimes.
3I've been reading a lot on the subject for quite a while now. I speak language #1, my husband speaks language #2, but we speak language #3 together (English). And we now live in a country where language #4 is spoken. So whether we want it or not, our kids will be exposed to four languages on a daily basis. It will either be a great success and opportunity for the kids or just a lot of work and we'll end up having to move or not teach them one of our first languages.
4Both my husband and I are french.
5I grew up in the USA with a mom that refused to speak to me in english... So when I moved back to France at 15, I was perfectly bilingual.
My son is 2 1/2. I speak to him in English when his dad isn't around. When it's the three of us we speak in French.
We've been living in morocco for 2 years, with the maid he speaks arabic (and he'll even translate for me).
He goes to jewish preschool, the teacher speaks only hebrew. So he's now getting a grip on hebrew.
French, English, Arabic, and hebrew
and he's not confused and has the language skills of a 4 yr old.
It's ALWAYS a lot of work. You have to be persistent but the end result is well worth it. What you're giving them is mental dexterity for life.
A child that knows two languages will have a much easier time learning a 3rd and 4th etc...
Yes my daughter speaks some Italian thanks to my mom who started teaching her random words since she was a toddler.
6I was actually just discussing this issue in my child and adolescent psychology class and apparently studies find (although its not very practical I understand) that the best way to help a child become bilingual more quickly and efficiently is to have one person (i.e. mom) speak to them in the one language exclusively and another person (i.e. dad, grandma, etc.) speak to them in the other language you want them to learn so that they can determine to themselves "okay I speak this way to A and that way to B"
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