With or With You

Observing Lilia speak different languages makes me realise subtle differences between languages. Example, the preposition "with". In French, German and English, playing "with" someone or "with" a toy is said in the same way. However, there are 2 with words in Arabic: b' and maa

1. "nelaab b' ettonobil ": I play with a car (meaning the car is an object to which the action is done)
   
2. "nelaab maa papa": I play with daddy (meaning daddy is a subject who does the action along)
   

Lilia has not made the distinction between the 2 with yet. She only uses b'. So when she says: nelaab b' Ines, I used to be scared to what she would do to Ines as the b' means she considers her little sister as a toy! Now I understand that she means "maa", I simply repeat her sentence with maa instead of b'.

Has English Won Already?

Now here's a thought: we always expected Lilia to drop all languages except English at some point, just because we're living in England. But what if her English is already stronger than her German, French and Arabic?

Would we actually notice?

She doesn't really speak English at home that much. She does a bit. When she comes home from pre-school, she will often spend the rest of the day speaking English to herself. But since Souad and I do not speak English with her, she essentially only speaks it with herself.

That means that we will actually not notice when her English has surpassed the other languages.

Maybe it has happened already...

Help Your Child Learn Languages in 3 Easy Steps

So you want your child to be able to speak more than one language? And fluently?

Here's how to do it in 3 easy steps. Ok, step 1 is not so easy.

1. Live Multilingual

Do you and your partner share the same native tongue? No? Brilliant!

One of the two best ways to teach multiple languages to a child is called "one parent one language" or OPOL. The idea is that each parent speaks his native language exclusively and so the child is able to pick it up with all it's facets and subtleties.

This works even before the child knows what a language is, because it can easily see the difference between the two parents. What I call "German", Lilia refers to as "How papa speaks".

Do you live abroad? Yes? Good!

If you live in a place where the common language is not yours, you can follow the other good approach, called "minority language at home" or ML@H. For this to work, the parents speak one language at home, while everyone else speaks another one.

2. Start Early

There is no point waiting! A baby's brain is really good at soaking up information, and the sooner you start feeding it with languages to assimilate, the easier it will be.

You could think of the brain as a framework able to process any kind of language. Once it starts to learn one, some things get "hard coded", and those might later get in the way of learning another language. So, hearing multiple languages right from the start helps keep the brain flexible and ready for more.

3. Don't Worry

From people who repeat the same old worrysome myths ("she will NEVER speak properly!") to nagging thoughts about vocabulary, there will always be occasion to worry.

For example, your child might decide not to speak your language. But there's really no need to worry too much. Chances are it will as soon as you spend some time in a place where that language is used.

In our family, we do a mixture of OPOL and ML@H: I speak German, Souad speaks "Algerian" (a mixture of Arabic and French). And because we're in England, everybody else speaks English.

Is Lilia able to cope with 4 different languages? As far as we can tell so far, she has no problem keeping up. And really, with everything a child has to learn, one language more or less does not make that much of a difference anyway, does it?