Babies on the Brain
lucieanne
member
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Speaking to Baby in Non-Native Language
lucieanne
member
Hello everyone,
This could be a pages-long post, but I'll try to keep it short. Basically: I am a native English-speaker with an M.A. in German, have years of experience teaching German, have spent many months living in Germany and Austria, and in general - although I occasionally make mistakes and do have a small accent - speak German well. I've always known in the back of my head that I would start teaching my child German from a very young age, using story books and tapes, etc.
But recently (the last few years) I've come across a community of mamas online who are speaking exclusively to their children in their non-native language, and so their children have become what I call 'artifical bilinguals,' meaning they are fully bilingual but have 'inherited' their parents accent and occasional mistakes.
My husband and I are TTC and we are seriously thinking about jumping aboard that train, using the OPOL (one parent, one language) method. With all the new research pointing to the benefits of bilingualism, and we all know how sponge-like babies' brains are, I think I could regret not doing this for my child. But I have some apprehensions, mostly:
1) Is it right to do this, knowing that the German my child would learn would be 'artificial?' - to which a part of me answers, if he waited to learn a foreign language until school, he would still have imperfect speech in the foreign language. In fact it would be much worse!
2) Knowing that ultimately this decision is up to my husband and I only, I still feel like this whole concept is somehow silly, even pretentious.
What do you think?
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