What language to teach my kids...
 

I have a 3 year old daughter and a four year old boy.

I would like them to learn a 2nd language and would like opinions on which one I should choose, when to get started and the best method(s) to use.

teach them Klingon. that's always useful

I had wanted my kids to learn a second language - and had the perfect opportunity since the woman who was taking care of them spoke Fresian. But, she was lazy and it was easier not to teach them, so she didn't.:rolleyes: Hell, at that age, you just have to speak it, and they will learn!

I suppose that the most useful would be the most common foreign language in your area. Immersion is the best way to teach a kid, in my opinion. Get videos in the chosen language (Spanish, German, French and Italian are the easiest ones to find, and I believe in that order). It's a good starting point.

The more exotic the language, though, the more fun they'll probably have with it, it being almost a 'secret' language between them - and it might be more valuable than knowing, say, Spanish. But, then again, knowing Spanish would probably be more easily useful, no?

Yeah, I'm gonna stop babbling now. :)

esperanto :D


In the US the second language most spoken is Spanish, and it is on the rise in numbers.

If you have ancestors from a particular country, you might want to teach them a language from there to help give your children a link to their past.


It is great that you want to teach your children another language! Any choice you make will broaden their experience.

Chinese, so they can follow after where all our jobs are going. Just kidding!

I'd say Spanish since Spanish seems to be becoming this country's second language, and just to be eccentric, I'll vote for Latin as a second choice. Why? Latin may be a "dead" language, but before it passed on, it became the mother of all tongues. Even English has many words derived from the Latin. Latin is the language of science, medicine, and the law, as well as theological scholars; not to mention classical ones. Its too bad so few of our high schools offer it anymore - just one more symptom of the decline of our educational system.

Latin aside, kids pick up foreign languages pretty fast. I was speaking German at age 5 when my Dad was stationed over there (alas, my folks didn't encourage me to keep it up, so I forgot most of it when we returned to the US 3 years later). If you can swing it, I'd say hire someone whose native tongue you want your children to learn to come be their nanny for a few hours a week. Tell her to speak in her language with your kids. You'll be amazed at how fast they pick it up.

buy' ngop

I vote for Spanish. The Hispanic population is growing by leaps and bounds. The Quebecois population is holding steady. Thank God.

I learned French because I thought it would get me girls. I was wrong. It got me hit on by guys. *sigh*

My girls are learning French. It's not so important which language kids learn. The main thing is that they work on a second language early so they're wired for it. They can learn Tagalog later.

sounds like a good thread idea

From a practicality standpoint, in the USA, after a person knows English, Spanish is the best idea.

If you want your child to be marketable with the government and CIA, you might want to choose one of the mid-east languages. Maybe that's a good reason to avoid those languages.

Otherwise, Spanish makes the most sense.

If your child is old enough to have a preference, a language of his/her choice would probably be more fun to them. French/German/Italian are all good for trips to Europe.

But really, Spanish is the best bet.

if you teach them Latin, they would have a very easy time adding spanish, italian, and french.

I was going to suggest the same thing Jim. Latin makes all the romance languages easy to learn. While spanish is practical, it's also very easy. While they're young and learning languages is easy, latin would be a good choice. It will make learning French, Spanish, Italian, and Portugese very easy.

If, for practical reasons, you want to choose languages based on the number of people they can communicate with, Chinese, Spanish, French, and Portugese are probably your best bets and as you can see latin gives you a fantastic head start on these.

I wish I had taken latin in school instead of Spanish. Though I can still speak Spanish fluently.

I had six years of Latin because I didn't want to take a language. ;) It helped with my SATs, but I can hardly remember a word of it.

I totally agree with that! That's part of the reason why I took French in high school...my
family crest (coat of arms) has its' motto in French:

"Sans mal". (without death)

Plus, I liked the way the French language sounded when spoken :D

i failed french 1 cuz i was too embarrassed to speak it in class.

i switched to spanish, and failed that because i like to fuck off.

i still learned un pocito espanol, though. pass los cacahuetes. Lo siento, yo stupido

perl. Definitely perl.

I'd go for Spanish at this point.

I didn't do well with languages in school. I think they ought to teach it earlier than they do. But I can still count to ten in German, French and Spanish. :)

On a completely unrelated note, my seventh grade English teacher forced us to memorize the prepositions. I was never good at memorizing things, and I nearly failed the seventh grade because of it. I had to go to summer school . just to memorize the prepositions. Unbelievable.

But, now I have this: (takes deep breath)
aboutaboveacrossagainstalongamidamongaroundatbefore
behindbelowbeneathbesidebesidesbetweenbeyondbutby
concerningdownduringexceptforfromininsideintolikenearofoffon
ontooutsideoverpastsincethroughthroughouttotowardtowards
underunderneathuntilupuponwithwithinwithout

Now, isn't that worthwhile? (Yeah, I've probably missed a few here and there, but we're going on fifteen years since.)

I took latin in high school for a year or maybe two.

I wouldn't recommend it for kids. It's not a language that anyone speaks as a native, so the only time you hear it spoken is in class. It's more of a written language. Kids are going to be less excited about a written language. Sure, it will help with learning the other languages, but not as much as studying those other languages would.

But wouldn't it be cool to be able to understand bits of The Passion without the subtitles? That's useful, isn't it?

I've been wanting to learn Ancient (not New Testament) Greek for a while, but have been thwarted by the lack of colleges offering such a thing. Also, It's something that I want to do, but don't really want to have to make massive adjustments in my schedule to accomplish. I have several "teach yourself ancient greek" books, but I stall somewhere around chapter three or so. I work better when I have a more structured environment and the feedback of a live teacher, particularly for something like language acquisition.

And yes, it has occurred to me that I could/should pursue education in some language of practical usefulness, like Spanish. There is a fairly large Spanish-speaking population in the area, and it might come in handy at work, however, doing such an thing violates my belief that "you're in America, speak American dammit!"

A refresher in German would probably not hurt me much, though. Reading Stern is a lot more of a struggle than it used to be.

Now you're speaking MY language...ha! I just don't understand how anyone can communicate "properly" if they don't learn the language (and I mean without the help of an interpreter).

Aren't "we" (Americans) expected to do the same when visiting other countries (learn *some* of the native language)?

No. We're lucky that way.
Move there, on the other hand, and it's a different story.

I'm the same way with Ancient Egyptian... I always stall out. (The Oriental Insitute at the University of Chicago has a correspondence course, but I already have the textbook they use, and I've never felt like paying the course fee to have somebody take me through it by mail. Tho it's possible that if I did pay I'd be more diligent about it.)

Oh yeah, I love Stern. My favorite was when he had the cheerleaders and the strippers on teams playing trivial pursuit against each other.

Go for a roman language. Maybe spanish. After knowing that it's a piece of cake to learn french, italian or portugese.
It's maybe the easiest to teach and learn.
I speak about 5-6 languages but only "european" ones. Would like to try some russian or japanese... But it's difficult cause different letters

pi, you know 5 or 6 languages? why the uncertainty? i'd think that someone smart enough to learn all of thoses languages would be smart enough to count to 6. which is it 5 or 6? and name them. i'm friggin impressed.

let me ask you this: when you are speaking a different tongue, what language do you "think" in?

what is your first language?

I'm not shure because it depends on how you count all the languages:
1. luxemburgish (is it a real language, I'd say yes...)
2. german (at school when I was 6, but knew already some because of german TV)
3. french ( when I was 7, at school, quite difficult)
4. english (12 years, at school, knew some because of music and so on)
5. spanish (16 years, at school but only for 2 years, would need some exercice to get in again but still understand when watching TV)
6. dutch (20 years, never learned it in school, but over here in Brussels, I have lots of dutch-speaking friends, quite the same as luxemburgish or german)
7. italian/portugese (can read a newspaper and understand the meaning of it, can do some shopping and understand if spoken slowly, never learned it but's easy if you know french and spanish).
Still trying to learn more...
Don't need to translate when using first 4 languages, sometimes dream in 2-3 different languages in one dream. That's really crazy!

Wow! I actually agree with Radar on something! My study of Latin made it a lot easier for me to learn Portiguese and Spanish. When I was in Mexico and my Spanish failed me, I'd try Latin. Boy did everyone have some good laughs off that one! Plus, I know all these cool Latin phrases like "Ad astra per asperum" and "Cave canem!"

yeah, you sound SO much smarter than everyone else if you throw a little latin at them. they don;t know what the hell you just said, but won;t want to admit it because they figure you must have gone to a better college.

meanwhile, i know " carpe diem" and that's about it. I did learn the latin "roots" of words in 7th grade, and it helps my vocabulary immensely. between context and word roots, i can usually figure out what a word i've not heard means without having to look it up.

I had two years Latin force fed to me in high school, and I chose to take two years of german. I have mixed feeling about Latin. It is useful yes, but I think I would have preferred two years of a modern language.

Favorite Latin phrase:

'He secretly knows the faith'

translates in Latin as "fedim clam scit' pronounced as you think it should be.


favorite German phrase,

"Ich habe eine apfelkuchen in meine hose."

Some kids in my class convinced someone outside the class into thinking this was a pick up line to use on the German exchange girls that were visiting our school for two weeks. The guy had to be suspicous, but he used it anyway.

That's GOOOOOOD.

All the German that one of my friend's retained was the ability to shout "Dieser Pullover ist sehr klar!"

Not terribly useful, but funny.

To show off my lack of Latin:

Illegitimi non carborundum.

Actually both sentences (I mean the german ones) don't mean anything

i think it's great that you want to teach your kid a foreign language so early. it's so easy at that age!! at the bottom of my post, i put a link to the site where you can get videos to instruct very young children in a foreign language.
a common stereotype in russia is that americans are the only people who never learn to speak foreign languages, because they think everyone should know english. joke: what do you call someone who speaks two languages? bilingual. what do you call someone who speaks more than two languages? multilingual. what do you call someone who speaks one language? american.
that bothers me!! so anyway, i think you're doing a great job as a parent, and i think a lot of people were right when they suggested spanish, because it is the second most prevalent language in the U.S, and learning it would make it easier to learn portuguese, french, italian- even russian! i took 4 years of spanish in high school, and now that i'm learning russian, it is so much easier for me because i understand things like verb conjugation and gender of nouns...

http://www.russianmeetingplace.com/f...&threadid=1188 (the forum where i discovered these stereotypes about americans)

http://thetoyhunt.com/litpeopvid-bil...OVMTC=standard (videos to teach young children foreign languages.)

hmm,

'This sweater is very clearly'

is what wolf's seems to mean.

With the help of babel fish I have tacked on what look like the correct suffixes for words in my sentence to get

'Ich habe einen Apfelkuchen in meinen Hosen'.

Word endings suck.

I have an apple cookie in my pants?

I don't get it. :confused:

How weird. Those are the only 2 phrases I remember from my year of Latin. I don't even remember how the first translates, but I couldn't forget the "cave canem" to save my life.

My first Latin teacher was named Mr. Cave. Fun.


Veni, vidi, vincit concat concidi!

Is that an apple cookie in your pants or are you just.... oh never mind...

"Cave canem" does have a nice ring to it, doesn't it?" My Latin text book had a picture of a piece of ancient Roman marble that had been dug up with those words inscribed on it and a picture of a dog with lots of teeth. The other phrase means 'to the stars through difficulty."

My Latin teacher was named Mrs. Galley, and we all called ourselves "Galley slaves."

Actually, my second Latin teacher was named Mrs. Payne. I wonder if this is a Latin teacher tradition.

Holy shit! I remember that! This one, I think.

Edit: Actually, this one looks more familiar.

They have meaning. They just don't make sense.