multilingual children

Jamie   Saturday, October 02, 2004, 04:14 GMT
Hi has anyone here raised children to be fluent in two or more languages? what methods did you use and were they successful?
Ed   Saturday, October 02, 2004, 14:55 GMT
I am such a child :-P
Nico   Sunday, October 03, 2004, 04:18 GMT
Me too. My mother used to talk to me in Valencian (a variety of Catalan), my father in a Spanish dialect (from another area of Valencia) but when I got out of home I'd meet Madrilenian Spanish, closer to the standard language. I truly thank my parents for this, since it kind of 'opened' my mind to other languages. I've heard about kids who get in trouble with languages or take a long time to start speaking, but this wasn't my case. As for the method my parents used... well, both used the language they were spoken to as kids with us. And it worked :-)
Jim   Monday, October 04, 2004, 01:41 GMT
How different are the two dialects?
Ate a ham-lit for breck-fist   Monday, October 04, 2004, 03:53 GMT
From birth, I was raised to speak both English and Mandarin/Putonghua Chinese fluently and Cantonese and Shanghainese not-so-fluently. I was inundated with all four languages/dialects from the day I was born but English and Putonghua were the languages I formally learnt at home and at school and therefore gained the upper hand before long.

Methods? Speak to the child in language number 1 and force him/her to reply in that language. Have the child's mother speak to him/her in language number 2 and force him/her to reply in that language. When the child turns 5 or 6, force him/her to speak to both of you in the language not taught at school. That's what my parents did.