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Welcome to the site, Sean! I generally encourage learning foreign languages but it requires that the parents can participate. Don't underestimate the challenge of new languages. My personal experience is that children can learn languages nearly automatically but adults find it very difficult. If you have a history of little or poor language learning ...

I think it is an extremely bad idea to put a child into a school which teaches in a language you don't understand, and they have no background in. Children need help with their homework in order to do well, if it's in Mandarin how in the world would you even know if your child has even done it? And you are right to be worried about your child being ...

I think the most important thing is to use languages you are proficient in. That way the child can learn language nuances. If you don't think you're proficient enough in English to read those books, try getting someone who is proficient enough to read them in English.

What's the spoken language policy at home? One parent-one language is a popular policy in Europe. India & Philippines are remarkable for the nonstop language switching and that system seems to work fine. I'm working on teaching my son Russian (I'm also not a native speaker of Russian). We follow a one parent-one language policy, so I sometimes read the ...

If you start reading immediately after your child is born (or even before!), which I highly recommend, and if the goal specifically to exposure your child to English language, then I'd read the English story books in English only. However, I'd suggest taking it a step further than just reading a selection of stories in English. The more exposure to each ...

Experience from my bilingual family set up (5 year-old child): First of all, I don't think you should worry. Second, I don't think you need to look for any pediatrician advice at this point. Third: the problem may me more related to the parents than to the child. If both parents work full time, and pre-school is in English, the child will have to work ...

thank you for the suggestions! following some of the advice, i changed the words i was using to search for these songs, and found this lovely piece at : http://akshara.niketana.com/ It uses a simple tune to go through a aa e ee all the way through the vyanjanas (consonants) also ! Which was exactly what I was looking for. it has no images, but the song ...

If your son is otherwise progressing well in his development (that "his play becomes more complicated" and "he wants to explain the rules" is an indication of that), I would not worry (and would certainly not start hectic manouevres to speed up his linguistic development). If you don't feel qualified to judge his general development, don't hesitate to talk ...

When an adult doesn't know a word in a foreign language, they will resort to complicated sentences that have lots of subordinate clauses (i.e. that thing I used to eat cereal with). That would be way out of the range of a kid in the 2 word sentence phase. So he's looking for the right pair of words to express himself. I've read that vocab acquisition is ...

From 0 to now, your baby has been listening to the sounds of the language. Quantity is more important than quality-- that seems to be the consensus for the writers of the English, Tagalog and Russian nursery rhyme authors that we read to our baby. Sometimes I go through the alphabet or a list of words and just put them in any sentence that comes to mind ...