16
Your first question
The best gift you can give your child is for your wife to speak in Russian, and for you to speak in English. I speak by experience.
During the first 4 years of my daughter's life, I spoke to her only in Spanish, my wife spoke to her only in French.
When she was 5 or 6 years old, I started to use French at home but, my wife and I also ...
14
It's never too late to learn a language! And it's especially worthwhile to learn English, seeing that it is the modern world's international language of business and science. I do recommend that you get your son educated in English.
As for teaching him yourself, you can teach him the basics and eventually enroll him in some form of professional language ...
10
An answer from my husband who's a developmental psychologist:
Bilingualism does not cause any impairments or delays, although vocabulary may be slower to acquire. It helps if the child is exposed to rich language environments in both languages: for example, if they are surrounded by one language at home and another language at kindergarten. Exposure to ...
8
You should never avoid speaking your own language to your child. Especially if it's globally useful language like English or Spanish. In fact it will do your child a huge favour to be raised multilingual. Some children raised in multilingual environments get fluent a little later, but when they do they are in much better position than their monolingual peers....
7
My linguistics professors at university told me that all languages are roughly equally difficult because children learn their native language at roughly the same speed across the world. Languages that are difficult in one respect (say, morphology) are usually easier in another respect (say, word order). However, "language" in this kind of statement refers to ...
7
Firstly, it does seem that some languages might be inherently more difficult than other languages to learn in the classroom. This is because many languages have large amounts of irregulars, exceptions to grammar rules, and things like that. Some languages also have larger useful lexicons than others, but that seems pretty marginal.
However, given that ...
6
Yes, there is such a thing as an inherent difficulty of a language. All languages are learnable by children, but it is clear that there are features that require more time to learn, and languages having these features can be classified as inherently harder than others.
Consider research on first-language acquisition of past tense inflection in Icelandic, ...
6
Based on personal experience I would say no.
I grew up bilingual swedish and finnish while living in sweden with one finnish speaking parent. While I did speak finnish almost exclusively with on parent and I a fast reader of swedish I can not effortlessly read finnish.
The things tripping me up are the small spelling differences, y -> u and o -> å as well ...
5
How Children Learn Language is a book that covers this topic. This is the book's summary:
Demonstrating how children learn to produce and distinguish between sounds, and their acquisition of words and meanings, this book explains their incredible mastery of language. William O'Grady provides readers with an overview not only of the language acquisition ...
5
According to some research and personal experience, I would suggest to use the first option "One adult - one language" for younger children (until the age of 4 or 5). At that stage children do not understand context switching (e.g. speaking one language at home and another one outside). But they adjust well speaking different languages with different ...
4
Send your child (when around 4 years old) for a long summer vacation (full immersion course) in Russia with grandparents. Your 4 year old child will be fluent in Russian in just 3-4 months, so well that it might take a month to get back to English, and will retain (basic) Russian for many years.
You child's Russian will need to be periodically renewed ...
4
| Should he learn it? |
Obviously, if you could add a language to your son's linguistic diversity, you should definitely do so. English, particularly, is a very good choice as it is one of the most spoken languages on earth so it will be very useful in foreign countries - even ones that are not necessarily english-speaking countries.
| Can he learn it? |
...
4
My answer is based on personal experience of teaching a child to read and write Russian while living in North America. Russian also has a fairly straightforward relationship between pronunciation and writing.
Here are a few things to consider:
As child grows up in a foreign environment, he/she lacks the environment to learn the native language from ...
3
Children can easily remember whatever you say them. And the same words they reply when you ask. Practice with children might be an option for vocabulary improvement but not the better practice source. The complex words she may not talk with you, talking with children help to build basic & regular using words.
3
You should speak German with your children and your wife should speak Korean, as these are your native languages.
You should make sure your children pick up some language for use at school - probably Japanese or English. This can happen at daycare (if they start there young enough and if you can find one) or with friends, or at home (see below).
You should ...
3
In the country where I'm from every child is expected to at the very least learn a first language and a second language. Some even learn a third or a fourth language at school. Although we have very real problems with education it is hardly this policy's fault.
I myself in my own teaching have seen dual language houses done well and less well. You get ...
3
This seems like quite a lofty goal. 40 minutes per week is quite difficult for students who actually have exposure with the language; for those without any experience, it's more than a herculean effort (for both the instructor and the students)!
I'm unfamiliar with the 英検, but according to wikipedia the first portion targets four skills: vocabulary, reading,...
3
A lot of initial language knowledge is transferred through the parents, especially at an early age. So the more words you know and use, the more your child will learn as well. Get a lexicon for children (like: a real lexicon, not just a book with pictures and words beside them.) and explore it together - the explanations will lead you to new words you do not ...
2
Audio books haven't been mentioned yet.
My daughter listens to them as background noise on repeat.
She picks up phrases from the dialogues and sometimes she asks about sentences she does not understand. (I have never seen this happen while watching TV.)
Additional, check out the questions related to language on Parenting Stack Exchange: there are a lot ...
2
You can do your daughter a great service by motivating her to read. In the scientific literature, this is known as extensive reading or reading for pleasure. There is a lot of research evidence on the benefits of extensive reading on vocabulary size and other aspects of linguistic development.
The report Reading for pleasure: A research overview from the ...
2
When I was living in Japan, I volunteered and taught English class and I had a lot of youth show up. They were mostly teenagers, but the best way they improved their English was giving them the opportunity to have English conversations with us, as well as with each other.
You can study textbooks and memorize words, but that doesn't mean you will become ...
2
A bit googling on "trilingual baby" and "bilingual baby" gives me some good results, of which one of the sites I share here : http://www.trilingualchildren.com/
Will the baby take longer to speak than he would if he was bilingual?
It depends if you have plan or not.
http://www.brainy-child.com/article/bilingual.shtml suggests parent who want to raise ...
2
One of the most effective techniques developed in teaching syllables to Russian children is Zaitsev's tables. The same approach was successfully used in Ukrainian and Kazakh languages. I assume it can be adapted to Finnish.
Nikolay Zaitsev spent his life teaching Russian to foreign students. His approach was to print a large poster containing all possible ...
2
Short answer:
Now.
Long answer:
The common approach to teaching bilingual children is "one person - one language". Little kids are confused by contextual language switching (e.g. we speak one language in private and another in public). But they easily associate language to person.
Some research claims that ability to express oneself completely in one ...
2
Imitation is an instinctive behaviour found in not only humans but other animals also. An obvious example would be parrots. So, naturally, children will learn languages through imitation of other native speakers. However, languages can also be acquired through reading and writing alone such as in the example of deaf-born individuals. Many may argue that one ...
2
Not a smartphone app, but desktop:
When my son was learning English (about 10 years old), I introduced him to computer game Civilization (available for free as "Freeciv" on Linux). There, different civilization advancement can have effects on your tribe (like inventing religion allows you to build a temple, which allows your city to grow bigger and still ...
2
The wikipedia article on feral children, that is children who have been raised by animals, might be useful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child
It claims:
They often seem mentally impaired and have almost insurmountable trouble learning a human language.
The reference, however, is not to published scientific literature, but rather to a popular ...
2
My experience with the Perso-Arabic (Arabic and Persian) and Hebrew alphabets tells me that you don't need IPA. Romanization/transliteration in a consistent way is perfectly good. The romanization should of course be combined with native audio of the same text, in order to confirm proper pronunciation. And it's much easier, for the average person, to look at ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
