You Can Talk to Your Child in a Language You Don’t Know — Yet

Our family mostly speaks in German, Spanish, and English at home. We also use ASL at bedtime. For a couple of years, I have been helping tens of thousands of parents to start talking in new languages with their little ones through free videos and online classes. With the release of my new book series, even more moms are able to talk in any language they want with their kids.

How does this work?

It turns out that the way we teach our child their first language is actually an incredible way to teach us all a second–even if we don’t know that language. Right now, for these three reasons, we are in the perfect position to learn and teach our child a second language.

1. As mothers, we need to communicate with our children to take care of business and have fun. Our children also need to communicate with us to… get what they want. 😉 This desire to realize our needs and wants pushed our children to start talking in their first language. We can use this same exchange of needs and wants to teach second languages. If your child really wants something, he’ll want to try and say it in the second language just to get it. That’s how your child learned the word for cookie, right?

It turns out that the way we teach our child their first language is actually an incredible way to teach us all a second.

2. Sometimes we’re like broken records. We same the same things again and again. Although it might drive us nuts, this repetition helped our children to learn their first language. We can learn and say the things we say a million times in a second language–helping us to learn these phrases and our children to understand them. (I took these high frequency phrases and other phrases thousands of parents requested and put them in my book series.)

3. People learn best through experiences–not sitting at a desk and listening.  Your child learned what clean up means because you said to clean up and then you started helping your little one to clean up. Our days are FULL of opportunities like this. We can use these same opportunities to learn and teach a second language through experiences. (You bet those phrases are in this book.)

If you want to see how easy and fun it is to learn and teach a second language with your child, you can start the free 20 minute challenge where you play together with a ball in Spanish, French, German, Italian, or Brazilian Portuguese, or you can request another language.