Raising Your Child Bi-lingual ( English - Dutch)

My DH is Dutch and I am American.

Our son is due in April, but our plan is for DH to only speak Dutch to the baby, I understand Dutch and know also plan on talking to the baby in Dutch even though I have an accent and my grammer is not perfect. I will also talk English. I am more than confident that the baby will learn perfect English, so we want to focus our efforts on Dutch.

Our goal for our baby is to speak and read dutch. I don't really care if he has an accent, I just want him to be able to communicate with his Dutch family.

We do go to holland twice a year and my in-laws visit once a year. In addition, we skype every sunday.

I have several children's books, and I am in the process of getting some CD's with children's songs on them that we can sing together.

I know it will be difficult at first, but but once we get used to talking Dutch to the baby, I am sure it will become more natural. Just think of it as the baby does not "understand" English so I just speak Dutch to him.

good luck!

That is so cool! We have a friend who is bi-lingual and has only spoken German to his daughter. She's 4 now so it's great when she answers him in German. She's a natural bi-lingual. When it's new word or phrase he just repeats it and she catches on pretty quick. He said he'll probably never stop. It's no different than kids learning to speak English I guess. She has movies in English and German. How great for calls home to family and friends.
I don't know about other moms speaking Dutch but you could probably put up signs locally.
Have fun 8 >).
K

My husband is a linguist, and speaks French fluently along with several other languages. When we lived in Europe, we met a little girl whose parents spoke French and Spanish, but English to each other. When she spoke (she was 3) it came out a garbled mix of the 3 languages. We were told that it is best to wait until they are 2 so that they can get well grounded in the first language. Wrong!!!

We waited until after 2 for our first daughter, and she would tell daddy he was saying bad words so he gave up. We did not wait for our son, and what a difference that made! He speaks French with daddy and English with the rest of us. Best of luck to you.

Hello there!
I have spoken German to my two daughters since they were born. My husband and everyone else speaks English with them and there have never been any issues. Nowadays, our oldest will correct my husbands pronunciation when he tries his German.... Both girls understand everything I say, though our oldest (5) has to be in the mood to return German. The younger is just under two, so she is still learning everything. When visiting Germany, our oldest adapts quickly now and can hold a conversation with the grand-parents and other family. To keep it fresh, when we are on vacation we are stocking up on all kinds of media and I read English and German stories before bed.
This also helped me to stay fluent as my German was getting rusty after all the years of English only xpt for the occasional phone call.
I find that when I am really tired, that I fall into English more than German, but after 5 years of training myself to speak German with our oldest, it is actually annoying to me when this happens, so I notice and switch. The kids go back and forth without problems.
The only time I have a bit of a problem is when we are with other people, who do not speak German. Then I feel rude if I use the language they do not know and am more likely to use English, especially if I do not know them well enough. Around friends, I am not so conflicted : )
Google offered this site: http://www.dutchconnectionaz.org/Home/Home.aspx in case they can help with the finding of other Dutch families in the area.
All the best and congratulations to your soon-to-arrive addition!

The most important thing is that the child hear the spoken language (even if it's just tv, but far better by a native speaker) regularly before the age of 2. The reason people have "accents" is that our brains become wired to the language we hear as infants/toddlers... we actually don't HEAR all the sounds in another language, and therefore can't reproduce what we hear correctly.

You don't have to speak Dutch exclusively, just regularly.

And yes, my son is at least 1/2 fluent in 4 languages and he's 8. None of them are spoken locally except English. (Eng, Japanese, Italian, German... and several others we've kept him exposed to, but he doesn't have the fluency yet: Hebrew, Norwegian, Swedish, Arabic, Spanish, Latin).

When we DO travel it takes him next to no time to pick up how to speak/talk to people. Myself, it takes about a month... but he just starts chattering away.

Like many kids exposed to more than one language he was a "late" talker.

My husband is German and it is important to us that our son at least have some ability in that language. When he was still an infant, my SIL sent us a book on raising bilingual children. In our case, only one parent is a native speaker and I basically know a lot of words, but am not really conversational. What this book recommended is establishing a consistent "frame" for speaking the second language. For us, it is when my husband and son are alone together, they speak German. When we are all three together we speak English. Our 3 year old son knows a lot of German words (nouns with the appropriate article, verbs). A really good thing to get is a book of nursery rhymes that comes with a CD. We have one that has nursery rhymes, but the CD speaks the rhyme once then does it as a song. He sings these all the time. My husband often takes him to daycare on the bus, and they speak german on the bus. He asks all the time, "what is x in german?" My inlaws have noted that he doesn't speak with an accent, which is what we were hoping. Clearly, he is not really bilingual, but we hope that we are giving him a good basis that can be expanded on with more traditional instruction at some point.

Good luck with this. It will be worth it. It also keeps my husband's german from getting too rusty :_)

You have an incredible gift that most Americans in a bilingual family takes advantage of. I am an educator and I have so many students who are raised in a bilingual family and they only speak English. Please teach your children your native tongue as well as English. The Dutch language/culture is one to appreciate!!!!

A friend of mine has a husband who is Dutch. They have taught their kids to speak some. They say it is very helpful when they talk to grandparents on the phone as well as when they travel there. Teach your child as much as you can! They are little sponges!