How does you super parents cope with...

sending your kids to the French international or GSIS,having to learn french or german as a second languages?(and if you are asian and those are not your first language..)Does that mean extra tutions and does it affect your kids 'learning ability comparing him/her with those kids who are first hand in the languages?How else do you help them daily?thanks.

If you go to GSIS as a non German speaker then you will be in the International stream, not the German stream so all classes will be taught in English, so there is no need to compare them with the native speakers. But by year 3 I think it is, they will be having a German lesson a day, plus mandarin.

Children learn extra languages astonishingly fast as long as there is consistency. One language per person! It really is no big deal for them. I learned four languages before the age of six without any real effort on my part. Kids don't see this as a chore. They are just learning to speak.


In our house we speak one language and the helper another. Our 3 year old is happy to translate as needed and will switch from one language to the other depending on whom she speaks to. With her sister she tends to jumble it up, but this is normal and not detrimental. She is also picking up some French from her friends.


Multi-lingual toddlers typically start speaking later than the norm, but they understand at the same rate, and they catch up later on the speaking. Also, don't be fooled if they don't speak the language right away. If they are exposed to it, after a while they start understanding very well. The Lower School principal at CDNIS says that parents think their children don't absorb any Mandarin at school, until they take a family vacation to Beijing and their kid starts talking with the locals in their language.


As for learning ability overall, some studies show that multi-lingual children do better than others, probably because they learn to be flexible. They certainly do not do worse.


So go for it.

And start as early as possible. Our 2 yo is a balanced bilingual [Mandarin and English] but lags behind in her 3rd language which we did not start until she was 14 months or so. What I have read is that the minimum exposure for near native ability is about 20 hours per week. The other thing that seems to make a huge difference [anecdotally -- based on the kids that we see around the playground] is whether or not the parents are making any effort to learn the language. The kids that I see whose parents can't speak a word of Mandarin tend to understand some but not speak, whereas the kids whose parents speak terrible Mandarin, but are at least putting in a little bit of effort can count on their 3 year olds to translate.

Interesting about the parents Z.

Yeah, I was amazed when I first started noticing this.