Don't know how to call it - quadrulingual problem? :) Please help. | Raising Children in More Than One Language | Forum

I found this forum on google. Hope you can give me some advice.

My wife is pregnant and we are very happy. We hope everything will be ok and I know that it is maybe a bit too early to think about these things but, we have a problem of what to do with the languages in the family.

My wife is Brazilian and speaks Portuguese, English and Spanish and learning Hebrew.
I am Israeli, my mother tongue is Russian and I speak here of course Hebrew and I know also English.

We live with my parents who are also Russian native speakers and know Hebrew (My mother knows it better then my father).

As we live in Israel, our future baby needs to know Hebrew. English is a must for the future. My wife of course wants the baby to know Portugues and my mom and dad will probably speak (naturally) some Russian with the baby.

The question is – WHAT TO DO ? :)

What will happen? the baby will go crazy and won't know how to speak any language or will know all? or what? How will it work? When it is 2 languages, fine, 3 is a mess I think. but 4?

Hope for some good advice. advise

Hi. Thanks for the reply.

Sounds too easy with how write it :)

About the English. Everybody knows English in Israel to some degree. But it is being tough only from the 3rd grade. Most of the people though who don't speak it, just can understand it and speaks with mistakes. People who needs it, study it a bit better later, and can speak without any problem. Depends also on how you are being raised (watching movies, music etc in English or not). Of course there are also different levels of classes in the school and different levels of teaching between schools.

Me and my spouse speak mostly English between each other, it just comes naturally. I am guessing the child will hear a lot of English from both of us because it comes so naturally to us in the daily routine.

I don't understand the part about the Hebrew. Community Language. Until some time, you don't expose the child to "community". First 2-3 years the main interaction of the child is with the parents, no? I don't understand how to suppose to work in reality.

(I would want to speak in English and Hebrew around the child, is that a problem? 2 languages spoken by the same person? confuses the child?)

The Russian – My parents will speak it. I speak it well but I prefer not to use it as I do forget some words sometimes and English and Hebrew comes much more naturally to me.

About the Portuguese, no doubt there. She will be the one to use it as I am also just learning it (and don't have too much time for that to be honest).

But what about dividing the time? I read that the more languages there are, the level of each language will drop when it is more then 3 languages, as the child should be exposed to around 30% of the time he/she are awake, to a certain language, to learn it well. How do you deal with that?

  again, thanks for the reply.

We too are starting to raise our daughter (6 mos) quadralingually.  In a few ways you're ahead of us because you speak something other than the "community" language at home.  My husband and I live in the US, he's Russian, I'm American – his second language is German, mine is French.  We've decided to focus on the two "native" languages, we speak English at home (though as my Russian improves that may change), my in-laws (my husband's parents and grandma) speak exclusively Russian.  For now we are exposing our daughter from time to time, depending on the friends in town or on speaker phone, to the German and French.  One thing we have done is make sure her book shelf is full of books in all four languages.  Through day care our daughter is also getting quite a lot of Tigrinya as well so we fully expect and look forward to the day when she has more languages than the two of us! 

Hallo there

Good to hear that we are not the only family in the 4 languages boat –

In our family it is: Kachchi (I would call it a dialect of Hindi) spoken by my husband, Polish – my mothertong, English – spoken between me and my husband and Danish – community language.

In Denmark it is rather a standard that children start in the daycare when they app. 1 year old and at this age our children started their exposure to Danish .We have a girl of 4,5 and a boy of 2,5. We are very consequent in using OPOL , although of course at the dinner table it can get a bit chaotic.

I must say that my daughter started to speak rather late – she was about 3, it gave me a few moments of hesitation if we were doing the right thing. But now she speaks fluent Danish, fluent Polish though with grammatical mistakes – but Polish is also a grammatical night mare ;). Her Kachchi vocabulary is a bit poorer and she fills the gaps in with Danish words. It will be a bit difficult to teach kids fluent Kachchi as we don’t know almost anybody speaking this language in our society and my husband grew up with only a spoken Kachchi (he learned it from his parents out of India) so we do not have any books or DVDs, which could help. But my husband feels it is worth trying as his family is spread in so many countries that Kachchi really helps to build bridges between cousins, especially when they are too small to know English.

My daughters Engilsh I would call rather passive, as she does understand almost everything, but chooses to answer in other languages if she knows the person understands it. My in-lows live in UK and when she is out on the playing ground with other kids I hear her talking to them, so she can when she feels that she needs it ;)

She is at the moment very aware that we are using a few languages – when going to visit friends of mine last weekend, she asked at the door “What language are we gonna speak to them?”.

Our boy is a very fast learner – at the age of 2,5 communicates very well in kachchi, danish  and polish and understands a lot of English. I can see quite a big difference how do their brains tackle this challenge. It comes really easy to him.

I enjoy every day when kids speak Polish to me, because I’m aware that one day they can decide that it is not “cool” to use it any more.

So from my experience I can also just confirm that it is doable and worth trying! Nothing warns the heart more than child saying to you in your mothertong – Good nigh my love / Dobranoc kochanie – this is what my boy said to me yesterday night, when I was closing his room.

We've had a previous discussion on the forum. Hope some of these examples can help:

http://www.multilingualliving……-use-opol/