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Categories > Your Questions — General > Any experiences of exposing two languages through splitting them by time?
 
 


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Asu
  Posted   Reply with quote  #1 
 Hi Everyone,

Me and my husband are Turkish and live in Turkey. We both speak English and German very fluently. We have a daugther, Mira. Mira is 2,5 months old and the question is how to teach her three languages;  Turkish, German and English.

I’ve been reading similar threads and trying to figure out the method which would suit us best. However, I have little accent in English and German while my husband has a strong accent in both of them. That’s why we agreed that I should focus on English and German, and my husband should focus on Turkish.

In this forum –thanks to which my ideas got shaped about multilingual children– I found some threads where one parent thinks about exposing two different languages by splitting time (certain days of the week certain languages) but I could not find any stories where the method was really applied.

Currently, I am talking to Mira two days only in German and the other two days only in English. Then two days only in German and English again… I am also supporting these languages with music and stories read by native speakers on DVDs.

I would appreciate any experiences with ‘time split’ approach?

Or maybe we should support ‘my time split approach’ with speaking German or English with my husband as the family language?

My fear is to cause Mira to mix up everything.

Many thanks in advance.

Cheers,

Asu
 
AC
  Posted   Reply with quote  #2 
Hi, we are native English speakers helping our kids learn French and Arabic. Their school day is split with 2.5 hours of French in the morning and 2.5 hours of Arabic in the afternoon. They have a different teacher in morning and afternoon so they learn to associate a particular teacher with each language.

I know that may not be so helpful for you since it is what the school is doing, not what we as parents are doing. However, maybe it will help you get an idea of amount of time etc.

One thing we do at home is that in addition to 30-40 minutes of reading in English at bedtime, my husband reads one Arabic book and I read one French book. Our kids beg for a translation and sometimes we give in but usually we try to just have them listen and look at the pictures to try to figure out what is being said. While the English books we read to them are above their level, the French and Arabic books are below their level with a lot more pictures.

All that to say, reading to your child in the three languages is one thing you can definitely do as parents, even while you’re trying to figure out the system for spontaneous speech.

Best wishes!
 
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