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You are here: Home Education Languages Ya te digo: My child learning Spanish

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27/02/2009Ya te digo: My child learning Spanish

Blogger Ivan Larcombe on how his three-year-old son goes through different stages as he learns to cope with a new language.

My son’s linguistic skills often garner him praise. Many parents of similarly aged children whom we know (Oscar will be three in March) are quite impressed with how well and how much he speaks – he is quite the chatterbox at times. Yet most of these people have kids who are learning two or more languages at once and tend to be less vocal, which is apparently common for children learning multiple languages. 

Oscar started going to a Spanish-speaking school recently and till then, he has had the ‘advantage’ of only having to tackle English. Now that has changed.

Before arriving in Barcelona in June 2008, we felt we were set to take on the challenges of picking up new languages. Oscar is at that amazing language acquisition age; Katie was prepared for a learning curve with her Spanish and I was ready to brush off my strong but rusty Spanish and break out my fledgling Catalan.

But life in a tri-lingual environment was not for us. English at home mixed with various degrees Spanish and Catalan in the world made for some interesting challenges.

Finding a pre-school for Oscar that wasn’t conducted in Catalan wasn’t easy and so we ended up joining some expat playgroups. Unfortunately, that meant that Oscar’s exposure to Spanish was minimal. That changed a few weeks ago when we relocated to Valencia and enrolled Oscar in a Spanish escuela infantil.

Before: don’t say that!
It was difficult to know what to expect from our little boy as he entered this new world. For the four or five months immediately preceding his first day at pre-school, Oscar would not tolerate me speaking Spanish to him. If we were out and I spoke to a Spaniard, that was fine. But every time I addressed him in our adopted language, he would scrunch up his face in an angry scowl and shout: “Don’t say that!” He still does it.
 
Oscar used to say that when I speak to him in Spanish. 
 
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