Can I teach my child a language I don’t speak?

The honest answer

Wherever you are starting from, the answer is partly: you can give your child a real start, and going further takes more people than you alone. Researchers who study early bilingualism are frank about the limit: in some cases, where families are not fluent in a second language, early bilingualism might be unrealistic.¹ That limit is the reason for the plan below.

The limit comes from how children learn a language: from a lot of it, in conversation with people, ideally more than one person.¹ Video or audio alone is a weak substitute. In a well-known study, nine-month-olds who had twelve short sessions with native Mandarin speakers learned to tell apart two Mandarin speech sounds; babies who got the same speakers on video, or as audio alone, did not.² That study measured one pair of sounds, not a whole language, but in it the live person mattered.

So the plan has two parts. You, using the language in small daily moments. And at least one person or place where it is spoken natively. Your strongest language stays the main one. The AAP advises parents to use the language they are most comfortable with.³ Plenty of talk in a comfortable language, the bilingualism researchers add, is better than holding back because you are not fluent.¹

Will my non-native accent confuse my child?

It is a common worry, and a large recent study is reassuring. Among 3,150 children aged eleven to thirty-four months in the Toronto area, those who heard a lot of English spoken with a second-language accent had English vocabularies similar in size to children who heard mostly the local accent. The authors concluded that children are well equipped to handle accent variation.⁴ Those children were learning English in an English-speaking city, so they heard the local accent too, and their vocabularies were reported by parents. That is one more reason the plan includes native speakers.

What did differ, in another study, was range. Researchers recorded mothers playing with their two-year-olds in English: 29 native English speakers and 31 native Spanish speakers who regularly spoke English to their children. The mothers who rated their English as good spoke about as richly as the native speakers; none of the differences between those two groups was significant. The eight who rated their English as limited talked about as much, but with fewer different words and shorter sentences. Variety and sentence length are among the features linked with children’s language growth.⁵ Proficiency was self-rated, and the limited group was small.

That is a useful way to see your own Spanish or Korean. The accent is not the thing to work on. The range is, and it grows with you: one routine, one song, one more phrase at a time.

Why a native speaker belongs in the plan

A fluent speaker adds what a learning parent cannot yet supply. In a study of twenty-nine Spanish–English two-year-olds in South Florida, the share of a child’s English that came from native speakers predicted their English vocabulary, on top of how much English they heard; the number of different people they heard it from mattered too.⁶ It was a small study and a correlation, and the authors could not say why native input helped.

Daily, playful time with native speakers can add up quickly. In infant classrooms in Madrid, Spanish babies and toddlers had forty-five minutes to an hour a day of play-based English with native-speaking tutors. After eighteen weeks they were producing several times as much English as children in the same schools’ usual program of about two hours a week.⁷ They also had about twice the weekly time, and the program was run and reported by the researchers who designed it, so the study cannot say which part did the work. It does show the kind of place worth looking for.

How much of the day it takes is its own question. Researchers generally count a child as bilingual when each language makes up at least ten to twenty-five percent of what they hear, and even that is no guarantee.¹ Our guide to how much exposure a bilingual toddler needs goes through the numbers.

What a week can look like

• A few routines in the language. Snack, bath, getting dressed, the walk to the car. Each needs only a handful of words, and routines repeat, so a small vocabulary goes a long way: “Más, por favor” at snack, “¿Quieres jugar?” when the blocks come out.
• The words you learn alongside your child. A short list for this month: the foods, the toys, the bath things. A week ahead is enough; saying them together is the point.
• One person or place where the language is spoken natively. A babysitter, a grandparent on a weekly call, a playgroup, a library story time, an immersion daycare or a Saturday school. More than one voice helps, and other children who speak it give your child a reason to use it.^{1, 6}
• Songs and picture books in the language. They give you both lines to say, and the same words come back every time.
• A lower bar. Not fluency: a few real exchanges a day. A question, an answer, a laugh, in the language.

The two-language card routine shows one of those places at an ordinary meal.

What to expect

Understanding before speaking. Children learning a second language usually understand much more of it than they say. In a study of 406 children of about three and a half in Basel, Switzerland, who were learning German as a second language, understanding was well ahead of speaking in every language group. The gap was a little smaller for children who spent more than twelve hours a week in daycare.⁸ A child who answers your Spanish in English may understand more than they say.

Fewer words in that language. Bilingual children typically know fewer words in each language than children learning one, though counted together they come out close.¹ So a shorter list in the second language is expected, and a child’s real word count includes every language they use.³

Mixing. “I want agua” is not confusion. Using words from two languages in one sentence is a normal part of learning both.³ Our guide to two languages at two looks at mixing more closely.

For heritage parents. If you understand your parents’ language better than you speak it, you are in common company. Researchers who followed fifty-two Spanish–English children in South Florida from four and a half to ten found that by ten, nearly all spoke English more strongly, while over half still understood both languages about equally. They suggest the pattern may carry into adulthood, in the many adults who understand a family language they rarely speak.⁹ Understanding is a real place to start from, and your child can start there with you.

When it is fine to scale back

Some seasons have no room for it: a new baby, a move, a hard year at work, a toddler who shouts “no Spanish!” at every try. Scaling back, or stopping, is a reasonable family decision. The researchers who named that limit add two things worth keeping: bilingualism is only one way to support a child’s development, and a second language can be learned at any age.¹ The songs and phrases you shared were time well spent, and the language can come back later.

Where the app fits

Their First Words can help with your half of the plan: the word in Spanish or Korean, ready before the moment arrives. Each card has the picture, the written word and a female and a male native voice to copy, in whichever of the eight languages you pick on the language pill. The picture at the top of this page is the “Do you want to play?” card, one of the 35 free phrases: ¿Quieres jugar? in Spanish, 같이 놀래? in Korean. It is a prompt for you, not your child’s teacher, and it will not make either of you fluent. The exchange that counts is the one you have together.