On Teaching Toddlers a Foreign Language

I started speaking to my kids in German soon after the birth of my second son. Foreign languages are a passion of mine, and German has long been my strongest and the one I enjoy the most, but for months I hesitated to make the decision to speak to my children in a language other than my native tongue.

For one thing, we live in Nebraska, and despite the prevalence of German surnames in the area–invariably belonging to the descendants of homesteaders and 19th century immigrants–my wife and I have nobody else in our lives who would be able to speak German to our boys. I could hardly imagine learning a foreign language going well in the absence of authentic interaction with native speakers, and I worried this lack of cultural context would be a non-starter for setting up a learning environment.

For another, my own handle on the language is a far cry from native. In my own estimation, my German is solid, but at the same time I am all too aware of my limitations: certain gaps in my vocabulary, a rustiness when listening to the colloquial spoken language, and a lack of familiarity with child-directed language patterns. I worried that my unnatural-sounding German would so disfigure my children’s speech as to make the effort of teaching them the language all for naught. My waking nightmare centers upon a trip to Germany where, after years of teaching my kids German, my pride melts and horror sets in as I can find no one there who understands the outlandish babble I have put in his head.

Finally, I worried my deficiencies in the language and my children’s necessarily tenuous initial grasp on it would prevent my sons and me from expressing our emotions clearly. Would I be able to convince my sons to be brave and face their fears, make them understand that it is wrong to hit each other, or explain why we pray to Jesus? Would they understand my words well enough to appreciate this instruction?

These concerns delayed my decision to teach my boys German. My indecision was compounded by the apparent uniqueness of my situation. Many parents teach their children a language that is foreign to them, but this is almost always done in a country where that language is spoken (e.g., an American teaching his child French in France). Conversely, many parents teach their children a foreign language in a country where that language is not widely spoken, but this language is usually the parents’ native tongue (e.g., a Frenchman teaching his child French in the USA). I have never heard of a parent who has done what I was considering: teaching his child a foreign language in his own country. Many factors would seem to discourage it.

My concerns notwithstanding, at the encouragement of Professor Alexander Arguelles, a famous polyglot with whom I was taking a class on langauge learning, I decided to switch entirely to German with my boys. This American professor had done something similar, though not entirely the same, with his own children, speaking to them in French while sending them to a French school in Lebanon. He emphasized that my passion for the German language was likely to help me overcome any hurdles the experiment might put in my way.

I now speak to my boys in German whenever our family is alone. If they seem not to understand something I say, I point and act out what I want them to do. Sometimes I repeat myself in English, then say the same in German. We read books and watch TV shows in German. They like some of the kids books I ordered, including the Benno Biber series of board books, as well as TV shows like Die Sendung mit dem Elefanten, which I found on YouTube. I have also found to my surprise that the kids really hate certain other stories, for instance, any involving the beloved German children’s book character Schnuddel, whom they find too scary to countenance.

For all my efforts, the fruits of my effort have been a bit confusing so far. The boys understand common words and phrases such as “Mach die Tür zu!”, “Gehen wir in den Garten!”, and “Habt ihr gut geschlafen?” However, rarely do they speak German back to me. Sometimes they do something like refer to a caboose as a Dienstwagen, but rarely do I get them to say more than the odd word or two back to me.

I am not caring for them during the workday, so I am not able to provide much input to my kids. I realize they need far more exposure than they are currently getting, so I have signed my four-year-old up for weekly lessons at the German American Society in town. He will be starting classes this fall. I hope this class will provide authentic interaction with a native speaker that will bring the language alive.

Despite the ambiguous results of my efforts thus far, I still assess the arrangement to be of mutual benefit to me and my boys. For my part, I have created for myself a German language immersion experience in my own home. I am not only educating my children, but learning alongside them. There is a slight irony in staying up late reading Thomas Mann with relative ease only to then wake up the next morning and grogglily fumble with a mundane sentence like “Klemmt die Buchsen wieder in das Gehäuse ein!” Translation apps are a constant companion. I originally tried to store the phrases which give me pause as flash cards in the spaced repetition software Anki for later drilling, but I gave that up. My need to talk my kids through our daily routine has become my spaced repetition system.

My boys, for their part, are at the very least getting a head-start on learning the German language, but it is still my hope that I will transmit to them a reasonable command of the language before this is all over. At the very least, I have satisfied myself that I am doing them no harm in this little experiment of mine. Their nascent English is coming along just fine right alongside the latent German that I suppose is taking root somewhere deep down in the their little minds.