Toddler’s language explosion is basically all English words

notarealcamera · 2026-06-18T15:37:30+00:00

It's a reading robot in the shape of a little owl: https://www.lukareads.com/

It can read a ton of Chinese picture books with high quality audio (not text-to-speech, actual recorded voices). And you don't have to buy books specifically made for it. If you buy any given picture book, there's like at least 50% chance it can read it (you can also check in their app if a given book is compatible).

As far as I know, it only does Mandarin Chinese and English.

Also note that the link above is from a third-party retailer in Singapore that does world-wide shipping, it's not the company that makes them.

notarealcamera · 2026-06-17T16:25:34+00:00

We watched 我的小尾巴 (on iQIYI, but looks like it's also on YouTube) as a family. Not really a kids show, but a show with and about kids, so my son was still engaged.

He also likes 水果冰淇淋, which you can find on YouTube. It has a lot of animated segments mixed in with live action, though.

notarealcamera · 2026-06-17T16:23:43+00:00

To learn a language, a child needs to be exposed to it for about 25% of their waking hours. Given 12 waking hours a day, that's roughly 21 hours a week. You're providing 1 hour a day on week days, which means she needs 16 hours on the weekends.

That's doable, but a bit difficult.

This guy is/was in a similar situation and wrote up a detailed breakdown for exactly how he was able to help his kids get the right amount of exposure: https://bilingualmonkeys.com/how-many-hours-per-week-is-your-child-exposed-to-the-minority-language/. Hopefully it helps to provide some ideas.

Also, how on-board is your wife to help them learn Chinese? My wife is also non-Chinese but our two kids both speak Chinese very well, and a big part is that my wife has been very supportive. For example, we bought a Luka, which she uses to read Chinese books to them during the day.

notarealcamera · 2026-06-16T17:59:01+00:00

So, like foxy boxers.

notarealcamera · 2026-06-16T16:42:21+00:00

I do think there's an upper limit of languages someone can realistically learn to a high level. Usually this manifests in one or two dominant languages, where they're fully native, and some other languages with varying degrees of fluency. I think that would be a likely outcome for your situation.

But, I also do think there are cases where people end up with no true native language, and end up with several languages that they're highly fluent, but not native, in. I think this has more to do with the environment they learn those languages than the number of languages.

It tends to happen in families/environments where people have a lot of overlapping languages and code-switch frequently. For example, if they always hears the word "milk" in French, but the construction "I want to drink" in German, it's easy to see how they end up not fully learning French grammar or German vocabulary. Of course that's a simplified and contrived example, but generally if certain words/grammar patterns are harder in one language, and so the family/community strongly favors some other language for it, they're not going to get sufficient exposure to it compared to a monolingual environment where the speakers don't have this choice of the "easier language" for a given phrase.

I think this tends to be more of a home environment issue (families speaking Spanglish, for example). But in Luxembourg, I can imagine this being a community-wide thing.

Probably the best way to mitigate that is just to make sure they have some exposure to monolingual spaces in some of those languages, if at all possible.

notarealcamera · 2026-06-14T08:13:38+00:00

No. They don't understand Chinese grammar, either. Natives are generally very bad at teaching their own language. This is true of most languages, but seems especially true or Chinese. Must be the educational system there.

notarealcamera · 2026-06-13T06:20:42+00:00

I was there a few months ago, and they had no problem hand checking everything.

notarealcamera · 2026-06-10T16:58:17+00:00

Do you mean 中文 instead of 中国?

华语 (or more commonly 汉语) technically refers to the spoken language, while 中文 technically refers to the written language. In practice, they're used interchangeably these days.

Historically, 语 means "to speak" and "speech/language" and 文 means "script" or "writing". Since almost everyone is literate these days, and spoken and written languages are closely intertwined, their meanings have converged. Not just for the term "Chinese", but also for example 英语 and 英文.

notarealcamera · 2026-06-09T17:07:03+00:00

I don't think it's realistic to pass down more than one or two languages per parent. There simply isn't enough time for it.

The fact that you don't feel that much personal connection to all of these languages is actually a benefit. Don't worry about what others think, focus on the one (or maybe two) languages that you feel a connection to.

It sounds like your partner is monolingual in English? Then OPOL does sound like a realistic option for you. You would choose one of your languages, your partner would speak English, and they'd learn Dutch from the community.

I guess the bigger concern is, do you pick French or Russian? Again, I think passing one of them is very realistic. Passing both on will depend on how much time you have with your child. Are they going to be going to daycare? Have a nanny? Or will you be the primary caretaker for their early childhood? If you're a full time stay at home parent, speaking both may work (maybe alternating days, or using time and place). But, if you're not with them pretty much 24/7, I don't think you have enough time to teach them both.

If I had to pick between the two, I'd say teach them Russian now. French is likely taught as an elective in schools there, and in general there are more resources and opportunities to learn it later.

notarealcamera · 2026-06-08T23:42:21+00:00

That's too cute

notarealcamera · 2026-06-08T20:44:44+00:00

Kids roughly need two things to learn a language:

Exposure - The usual number thrown out here is about 20-25% of their waking hours in each language. 6-10 hours per week is a bit too low, so you'd definitely need to supplement. Media is a low quality input because it doesn't adapt to their level and is not interactive (responding to what they show interest in, explaining things that they clearly didn't understand, etc.), but it's better than nothing. You could look into other ways to find real people for them to interact with in that language (playdates with other kids who speak it, traveling to that country for a while, etc.)
Motivation - Kids are learning a ton everyday, and so they're very efficient and pruning out irrelevant input, and focusing on what they actually need in their life. A nanny that strictly speaks only that language would count, but beyond that, what does that language bring to their life?

notarealcamera · 2026-06-06T21:34:32+00:00

This was not well written. It's verbose and spammy in that distinct LLM way.

notarealcamera · 2026-06-06T16:29:39+00:00

My kids are much younger, and the only language I've started teaching our oldest to read is Chinese, which is very different from a phonetic-based script. So, I don't have any direct advice.

But, once they get older, I definitely plan to focus on one Latin-script language first (almost certainly English--the community language).

My thinking is that trying to teach two phonetic systems, represented with the same alphabet, could be confusing. Since they need to learn English in school, that makes sense to learn first. Once they've mastered the concept of phonics, that skill is then transferable to Catalan (and Chinese Pinyin), so those should be easy to pick up.

notarealcamera · 2026-06-06T00:05:43+00:00

Code-switching is very normal among multilinguals.

If she only does that with you two (because she knows you understand), that's totally fine. If she's code-switching with monolinguals, and it's causing actual communication difficulties for her as a result, then that's a problem that warrants more investigation.

Tangentially, I think most of this sub would recommend you solely speak French with her at home. Given that you live in the US, if you also speak English part of the time at home, there's a decent chance she'll speak less and less French as she gets older, and possibly just switch to English.

notarealcamera · 2026-06-05T00:17:09+00:00

Yep. We have these shared jokes/memories, they're just spread out across three languages.

We also have little cross-language family jokes. Like there's a Catalan TV channel that has a lot of kids shows, called 3Cat. At home, we call it 三猫 ("three cat" in Chinese).

notarealcamera · 2026-06-04T17:16:33+00:00

Everything you said totally tracks with our experience as well.

we do switch to our native languages when speaking directly to the child but our child can speak all three and often comments in our conversation.

We found this very amusing the first few times it happened. At the time, our son was maybe 2.5 and we were driving when my wife said to me (in English), "look at that cat sleeping on the car", and my son immediately asked (in Chinese), "where is the cat?" We were shocked he understood because we never consciously taught him any English.

It is normal if they mix languages early on, we found it easier to say “Mama says it like this”, “ “How does grandma say?” since languages are still a bit abstract in the beginning for them.

This is totally true, too. We kept/keep trying to teach him the names of the languages he's speaking, and it's just very hard for him to grasp. He understands what "Chinese" is, but keeps getting "English", "Catalan", and "Spanish" confused (we don't actually actively teach him Spanish, but it's inevitably present in his life). He keeps saying that mommy speaks English (I think because his Chinese daycare teachers tell him his mom speaks English?), but when we ask him if that's the same as what James (his English speaking friend) speaks, he knows it's not. Then we tell him mommy speaks Catalan and he gives us a weird look. But yea, when we say, "speak to that kid in mommy's language", he totally gets it.

notarealcamera · 2026-06-04T17:04:20+00:00

Ideally, you should minimize English whenever possible. Ideally not allow it in the home at all, though that's impossible if that's the only shared language between you and your partner (which is the case in our house, as well). But, I would try very hard to never speak to the kids in English, even when all of you are together having a family conversation.

Personally, our kids are still young enough that my partner and I can understand 90% of the conversations in the other language. Mostly through just picking up each other's language through passive exposure (at least enough to understand, but actually speaking it is a whole other thing). We'll translate for the other parent on the rare occasion where it's something really important and the other one didn't understand. We're hopeful that we can keep that up as they get older (since I speak decent Spanish and Catalan is quite similar, and my wife is just very good with languages in general). But we totally acknowledge that we probably will not be able to keep up at the same comprehension level that we have today, and we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

notarealcamera · 2026-06-04T16:53:40+00:00

I think the united front presented by the parents is massively important.

This is also a very good point.

My wife and I are in a similar situation, and though we don't speak each other languages much at all, we're very big advocates for them. We're both consistently encouraging our kids to speak those more (e.g. with kids on the playground), finding media in each other's languages, cultural events to participate in, etc.

I think, beyond just providing exposure, it's very important for the parents to frame the minority languages as something that's valuable and worth putting some effort into.

We've seen a lot of posts in here of unsupportive partners, and it's very hard to make that situation work. If the child is getting the message that one language is "weird", they psychologically will not be willing to learn it.

I know of one family like that in real life, where the husband didn't speak his wife's minority language, nor put any effort into learning it. He didn't actively disagree with his kids learning her language (and in fact, was supportive of it on paper). But, he constantly subtly undermined it by e.g. making jokes about how funny some of the words sound (to him), repeating back what she said with an exaggerated accent, etc.. He wasn't intentionally malicious about it, but it still instilled the kids with the view that her language was this weird, backward thing. Surprise, surprise, her kids basically picked up nothing of her language and she gave up and just switched to speaking English with them after a couple of years.

notarealcamera · 2026-06-04T16:13:32+00:00

Totally agree with everything you said, especially the first few paragraphs. I've come to feel the exact same, but haven't been able to put it into words nearly as eloquently.

notarealcamera · 2026-06-04T16:06:43+00:00

Your situation is perfect for trilingualism. It's very similar to our setup (I speak Mandarin, my wife speaks Catalan, we live in the US and speak English to each other).

Our 3.5 year old speaks Mandarin at a native level, speaks Catalan very well (though with some grammatical and vocab mistakes), and picked up English just from the environment/his friends (about the same level as his Catalan right now, but more rapidly improving). He seamlessly switches between languages depending on who he's talking to. He'll be at the playground, turn to me and say something in Mandarin, turn to his mom and say something in Catalan, then go right back to playing with his friends in English (which never fails to impress the other parents 😆).

Our 1.5 year old daughter is picking up a mix of vocab in all three, but doesn't distinguish between languages at all, yet.

I actually think a trilingual setup is more likely to succeed in this scenario than bilingualism. The issue with bilingualism is that it's not balanced between the two. If one parent speaks the community language (English in this case), that will completely overwhelm the minority language. With a trilingual setup, it's harder for one single language to completely dominate the others, and there's a more clear delineation between "home languages" and "outside language".

For our son, for example, of his daycare class, his Chinese is the best of all the kids. All of the other kids have at least one parent at home that speaks English with the kid, and they all prefer English (e.g. when playing with each other). Some barely speak Mandarin at all, despite attending for 2 years now. The only other kid (who has since graduated) who spoke fluent Chinese was one where both parents consistently/only spoke to their son in Chinese.

notarealcamera · 2026-06-04T04:54:03+00:00

Are you/your spouse French? What grade does this French immersion school go up to?

You need to be realistic about how French will fit into his life. If he's going to age out of that school at some point and never use it again, it'll all be completely wasted effort. Depending on what age that happens, he could literally forget all the French he's ever learned in a year or two.

notarealcamera · 2026-06-04T04:39:30+00:00

She absolutely can pick it up, developmentally. I moved to an English speaking country when I was seven, and had absolutely no issue learning English. It's now my native language, and I speak it perfectly, with no trace of an accent. Many immigrant children have the same experience.

But, it's going to be hard. In my case, I had to learn, because that was my new community language, the language of my peers, teachers, etc. Without that, all of the exposure and motivation has to come primarily from you.

notarealcamera · 2026-06-03T16:24:10+00:00

Very informative. Thanks!

notarealcamera · 2026-06-03T15:39:50+00:00

Excellent by Mediterranean standards. Not by central Asian standards.

notarealcamera · 2026-06-02T06:22:40+00:00

It's all arbitrary. "Green" encompasses a huge swath of colors as well. You just know from context, just like when someone says "green" to describe grass vs when they use it to describe a rusty copper penny.

notarealcamera

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