This is a good question as not being fluent in a language is the greatest fear and obstacle in starting to teach a child a second language. I know from personal experience because I’m a CBC and do not speak Chinese fluently, cannot read complete sentences and probably cannot write more than 1 sentence. Despite this, I have decided to teach my daughter Chinese. You don’t need to be fluent to teach your child how to speak Chinese or a second language.
Reasons Why We Don’t Start Teaching Children a Second Language
These are fears and just excuses why we don’t start teaching our children a second language:
- Fear that we are not good enough
- Fear that we are not teaching them proper language and vocab
- Fear of failure that the child will not learn
- Don’t know how to start to teach the child another language
All these fears attribute to the fact we are worried if we are not fluent we are not able to teach our children a second language. But you can put away those fears because we are all learning. There is no right or wrong way to teach a child. It all depends on how your child learns and/or age of the child.
I know from personal experience I was afraid of teaching my daughter a second language because I’m not fluent in Chinese. Babies learn everything and it’s best to start early and start talking to them immediately. It doesn’t matter if you are fluent or if I could read or not, my baby is not going to start reading or understand full sentences anyways. Consistency is the key. I was also worried that my husband didn’t speak the language would that be a problem (Post here) and even considered that I had to teach him Chinese first before baby came. That would have been impossible. But no that is not necessary either.
There are a lot of tools on the internet to help you learn simple Chinese words that you can repeat to your baby. It’s not necessary to be the greatest Chinese speaker, baby/children just needs simple words to learn and you can learn and grow with them in the language.
